I found my old HP Pavilion dv9700, which I believe I bought around 2006. It still boots into Windows Vista, although the display has red pixels that appear in dark areas. I'd like to repurpose it as a dedicated screen for viewing knitting patterns beside my couch, since I prefer not to use my phone for that. I already run Linux Mint on my main computer and am wondering whether it would work on this laptop for basic tasks such as opening a browser and viewing PDFs. The hardware is an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 at 2.00 GHz, 3 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS. Would Mint be practical, or should I use something lighter?
3 Answers
Yes, Linux should install on it, especially since that processor supports 64-bit operating systems. For this hardware, use a lightweight desktop such as Xfce, MATE, or LXQt rather than Cinnamon. Linux Mint Xfce would be a familiar and beginner-friendly choice, and it should handle PDFs and light browsing as long as you avoid having lots of tabs open.
The 3 GB of RAM is the main limitation, but your intended use is fairly light. Mint Xfce should be usable, though a very lightweight option such as antiX or Puppy Linux would leave more memory available for the browser. Try the live USB first so you can check performance and whether the display and graphics work properly before installing.
An SSD would make the laptop feel considerably more responsive if it still has its original hard drive. Adding more DDR2 RAM could also help if the machine supports it; another 1–2 GB would be useful, though neither upgrade is essential for displaying PDFs. The open-source graphics driver should be sufficient for this simple setup, so you probably don’t need to deal with the old proprietary NVIDIA driver.
Mint Xfce sounds ideal. I already use Mint with Cinnamon on my main computer, so the transition should be easy.