2025-03-09

SDF phloggers are no strangers to using old computers as their
daily drivers. Before I started seriously phlogging, I thought that
my HP elitebook from 2011 was quite old to be a primary computer.
But there are many fellow SDFers here that use even older hardware
as their primary computer. And of course I think that is absolutely
amazing. Utilizing computers to their fullest life reduces e-waste.

I recently received an old laptop from my sister and I decided to
see just how useable it was for me. The laptop itself was actually
a gift from me to my sister back in December 2009. It is a Lenovo
Ideapad Y550. It's honestly been so long that I can't remember much
of the computing market landscape back then but at the time it cost
$550 USD. So it wasn't exactly a low end laptop but obviously, it's
no thinkpad.

To be honest, the laptop itself is kind of unusual now that I look
back on it. It was configured with 3GB of RAM which I think was
pretty decent for the time. It has a Core 2 Duo processor running
at 2.2GHz and it has an Intel GMA4500 integrated graphics chip.
While it was terrible for gaming, that particular chipset did actual
support DirectX 10 and had a meager amount of shader units.

Probably the biggest weakness of the laptop is the comically slow
5400RPM 320GB hard drive it came with. I'm sure it was fine by the
standards of 2009 running the brand new Windows 7 operating system.
But I do recall my sister start to complain about the laptop speed
a few years in and I'm pretty sure that alot of it has to do with
the hard drive.

The 2 most stand-out "features" have to the comically small touchpad
and the strangely decent laptop speakers. The touchpad is about
1.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide with 2 physical buttons underneath
it. It is comically small but actually quite sensitive and responsive.
I can't remember if Apple was selling their laptops with the larger
form factor touchpads but certainly this IdeaPad has got to be one
of the last generation of notebooks sold with such a small touchpad.
Certainly by 2011 my Elitebook had a much larger touchpad more akin
to Mac laptops.

The other strange feature are the speakers. The laptop speakers
are actually branded as Dolby Digital speakers. In fact, there is
even a backlit Dolby Digital logo prominently featured above the
function keys. I honestly can't recall whether Lenovo supplied OEM
software to do something with the speakers but it wouldn't surprise
me. The quality of the speakers themselves are not super great by
MODERN standards. But by the standards of the time, they are quite
good. There is a bottom facing speaker in addition to the regular
2 top stereo speakers which they utilize for low end bass. It does
make the speakers better sounding than most others for the time
and at that price range.

But enough of the background history. How does the laptop stack up
today?

The first caveat is that I was not able to put in an SSD into the
laptop which greatly reduces the raw performance of what the laptop
could actually do. However, I did find a 7200rpm hard drive and
installed it. But even with that handicap, the Ideapad was still
quite useable for me.

The OS installation was surprisingly annoying. My first thought
was to use void linux or AntiX but I ran into problems with both
of those distros. I first tried voidlinux but when I booted the
live image from my USB drive, I noticed that the wifi card wasn't
recognized. Unfortunately, I didn't have the laptop hooked up to
ethernet and instead of bothering with that, I just decided to try
AntiX instead. That was probably a mistake. I should have just
tried to resolve the voidlinux issue instead.

so anyways, I booted the AntiX live USB image and it worked fine
but the Wifi again was not working.  This time, I just commited to
installing the distro to the hard drive and fixing the wifi later.
Well after the distro installed to the hard drive, it would get
past the grub boot selector and then just never load AntiX at all.
It would just sit there. ergghhh.

I was getting pretty impatient at the time and just decided to
install Debian 12 from a netinst CD that I had lying around...and
this time Debian told me what was actually wrong with the wifi. It
turns out the Ideapad uses a broadcom b43 based chip which requires
a non-free firmware download.  Debian makes it really obvious in
the install process itself that you need to download that firmware.

Voidlinux and AntiX both just booted and silently disabled the wifi
for some reason???

I could just be dumb but Debian made it super duper obvious that
I had to do something. So anyways, the solution I used was to
finally get off my ass and connect the laptop to ethernet and then
install the firmware-b43-installer package from the debian repos.
Once I did that, everything worked fine.

So after that I installed XFCE4 and I was good to go. For laptops
I usually use XFCE as it strikes a good balance of usability and
lean-ness while still being useable by other people when you give
it to them. If the computer was for my exclusive use and I wanted
it to be as lean as possible, I'd probably install i3 or openbox
myself personally.

Anyways, on to the performance testing. Obviously the Core 2 Duo
is an old processor but I actually found to to be pretty useful.
Anything on the command line is obviously fine. But I was easily
able to watch 480p twitch streams using the streamlink application.
Using MPV I was able to watch a 1080p documentary blu-ray rip
encoded with h265. I didn't really optimize the MPV configuration
but 1080p content is probably completely watchable. I suspect that
high bitrate action movies might drop some frames. But I do also
think that some hardware acceleration is possible with the GMA4500.

Of course the big achilles heel of ALL old computers is the "modern
web" UGHHH. Like a lot of gopher users, I despise what the web has
become from a content basis and a technical basis.

But sadly, there's not much to be done about it. Big time websites
like youtube and twitch do load on the Ideapad and are reasonably
useable. But if you are going to watch youtube or twitch, that's
pretty much the only thing you're going to be doing to be honest.
I do think the 3GB on the laptop does make a difference here as it
makes the Ideapad still viable for everyday use. E-commerce websites,
banking websites, and other regular websites work fine. But obviously,
the javascript heavy social networking sites and video sites pose
some difficulties. You can still surf there but it's not that great.
Perhaps an SSD might resolve some of it...but then again, maybe
not.

In any case, the way I consume youtube content makes the ideapad
still extremely useable for me personally. I normally download
youtube videos from the creators I follow using RSS feeds and yt-dlp
so I basically don't really interact with the full youtube website
all that much.

However, that's not really a common use case for youtube since it
completely eliminates the algorithmic discoverability of youtube
in general. but it also eliminates the need to have to open up a
full featured browser as well. It's a trade-off that I'm willing
to make.

I can discover new creators on my iphone and then just update my
RSS feeds to pull down their vids.

I don't often encode videos or edit videos so the ideapad wouldn't
hold me back in that respect. I do often transcode audio I download
from youtube into MP3s and do some light audio editing with Audacity.
The core 2 duo in the Ideapad works just fine for that.

all in all, I think the Core 2 Duo powered Lenovo Ideapad isn't an
unrealistic primary computer.  I think the 3 gigs of RAM it has
does still make it a viable computer for everyday usage. But with
the constant computational demands from the "modern web", I'm not
sure how long that will be true for.

Phew, this phlog was a long one. Anyways peace out!