How I made an Acer Aspire laptop useful again



A few days ago, I decided to tinker with an old Acer Aspire laptop in an attempt to make it useful again. It was running a previous version of Xubuntu, a lightweight Linux distribution, but nobody wantsed to use it because it was too damn slow. I could just imagine how it fares with Windows on it. I remember the time before I got my hands on those Linux installation diskettes, when I get frustrated with the way Windows crashes my desktop PC, and it was not a pleasant experience. This Acer Aspire, whilst it does not crash, it is too damn slow. Heck, my Raspberry Pi 4 is even faster! (Maybe because it is running Intel chips! Haha)
Anyway, I decided to get an internal SSD drive to replace this uber-slow HDD. A 480GB Kingston SSD to replace a 500GB HDD is not much of a trade-off considering that it is not intended to be the main workstation (we have Macs for those). All it took was opening the bottom cover and replacing the HDD (I found out that there is still an empty memory slot, so that is the next upgrade, I guess).
Next step was to decide which Linux distribution to install. I have read good reviews of Pop!_OS, Elementary OS and Zorin OS, and, of course, Ubuntu is still on my short list. Heck, I even thought of using the PC desktop version of Raspberry Pi OS! So I did download the installers for these distributions, with the exception of Elementary OS, which was taking too long to download, even on my 300Mbps connection!
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