thoughts from an empty head: Ars gear: the old Windows PC resurrected with Ubuntu

Designed for Windows XP, but it runs Ubuntu.

Jon Brodkin

I love buying gadgets, and I'm not one to deprive myself. My house has just about every piece of equipment I've ever lusted after, from a Mac Mini hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display to a Sony Bravia 3D TV connected to my PS3. I have a MacBook Air, PS Vita, iPad, Nintendo 3DS, Kindle touch—the list goes on.

I wouldn't want to do without any of them. But out of all my gadgets and computers, there's one I respect above all others, and it's an old piece of junk.

The Dell Latitude D620 pictured above has been a part of my life since mid-2007 when IDG, my previous employer, provisioned it to me to replace an older PC that died during a business trip. Running Windows XP, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 100GB of storage, and 2GB of RAM, the exceptionally sturdy laptop was a damn good computer—for a while. It eventually slowed down, becoming an unusable mess and a malware magnet that had to be repaired and cleaned more times than I like to remember. And with a battery that lasted 30 minutes to an hour if I was lucky, it was not ideal for my schedule involving frequent work travel.