Do you have an old laptop (or desktop) that by today’s standards is nothing more than a large paper weight? Have you tried re-imaging the machine back to the factory settings only to receive the dreaded blue screen of death? Well like many tech geeks, chances are probably pretty good that you have a closet full of old machines that you haven’t touched in years.

I recently took an old Toshiba Satellite (circa 2001) with 256 MB of RAM and re-imaged it with a vanilla install of Windows XP. I knew the machine would never be a solid replacement computer, that’s simply not possible with today’s applications, but my hope was to create a rather large, pseudo Netbook, good for emailing and web browsing. I was able to successfully install Windows XP, but once the thousands of necessary Windows updates were installed, it was painfully slow, making it unusable. I was to the point of yanking the hard drive and pitching it, thinking is it really worth all of this trouble? Well, enter the beautiful thing that is Linux.