Linux Mint 4.0 Beta on a Dell Inspiron 8100 Laptop

The other day my father dropped off his old Dell Insprion 8100 laptop that I think he has had for many years. It had Windows XP on it and well he thought my son might like it. Well, the first thing my son said was "Gee is it heavy and slow" he was right. Its not the fastest laptop in the world and it is build rather solid. My son has a gaming Intel 3g machine and he likes his video game so I could see his point.

I thought I would install Linux Mint 4.0 Beta on this laptop. I wanted to keep Windows XP on it just in case my son ever wanted to use it.

Here are the specs of the Dell laptop:

• Pentium III 866 MHz processor,
• 384 MB of RAM
• 20 GB hard drive
• 15 inch Ultra XGA TFT active-matrix display
• DVD CD-RW drive
• Onboard ethernet card
• Video card is a nVIDIA GeForce2 Go with 32 MB of RAM

The first thing I did was boot up with GParted ( Great Partioning Tool ) and I resized the 20 gig drive so that Windows would have 10 gigs, my Linux root would have 5 gigs; home 2 gigs and remainder for Linux swap. GParted handled all of this without losing any Windows XP data.

I saved all the settings in GParted and rebooted the laptop with the Linux Mint 4.0 Beta CD in the drive. I was actually surprised at how fast Linux Mint 4.0 Beta booted and presented me with the LiveCD interface.

I decided to install Linux Mint 4.0 Beta because I had looked at it in an earlier article where I tested it on a much faster machine. This laptop has plenty of RAM to do the basic web surfing and word processing applications. Plus I wanted to keep this old unit going as I think of it as a form of recycling and keeping this machine out of our land fills. <grin> Even though it had a working copy of Win XP on it...

I was able to install without any problems. I let Linux Mint do it's thing and I had a working Linux OS in no time.

Speed

If I wanted the fastest laptop in the world I guess I would go out and buy a new one. This laptop is what it is. Not fast but at the same time not slow. Linux Mint performs well on this laptop. The OS loads fast from boot up and all programs though not as fast as my desktop will load without any problems.

Multimedia

I do not recommend playing a DVD while on battery but this laptop played a couiple of my favorite DVD's without any issues. The media player popped up and started the movie. Sound worked fine right out of the box without any configuring by me. Sound wasnt even really that bad. Music CD's worked fine too.

Network

Linux Mint 4.0 saw my network card that is built onboard this laptop. I was able to download all updates immediately after installing the OS.

Conclusion

This laptop runs Linux just fine. I see on the web that you can buy one of these laptops for less than 300.00. Is it worth it? Well if you want a laptop next to your lazyboy chair and do not want to spend too much money I can say that this is a good way to go. If you want the latest and greatest, forget about it.

Linux Mint 4.0 Beta runs perfectly in all my tests. The boot loader was configured fine and I have a dual boot system if I need it. I often read about alot of people placing less resourceful Linux Distributions on slower laptops ( Xubuntu, DSL, etc ). Well I can say that if you have a similiar config for a laptop that you will not be disappointed in Linux Mint 4.0 Beta