I’m new to the linux world but so far it’s been pretty good. I just purchased a dell latitude E5420 on ebay for $100 bucks, it has a Intel I5 gen2 Processor so I can’t wait to put Ubuntu Mate on it to see how it runs. I recently had a friend drop by with a old Gateway 17 inch laptop that someone gave him. Aesthetically it look wonderful but under the hood was a Intel Pentium 4 with only 1Gb of RAM and a 60Gb IDE hard drive. Someone had installed windows XP Dark version on it to make it look like Windows 7, I asked my friend how much he paid for the laptop and he just stammered and said it was free so I’m hoping he didn’t pay a lot.

I told him there wasn’t anything he could do with the thing but trash it, then the thought popped into my head to try Unbuntu Mate 14.04 on it. Well folks I can tell you honestly it installed with very little hassle. I had to burn the ISO to a DVD disk because the laptop didn’t support USB booting and once the O.S., was installed it could not find a driver for the Intel Wireless 2200B card, but an update to Ubuntu Mate 15 fixed that problem.

Its been well over 3 weeks since I delivered his little monster back to him and he hasn’t registered one complaint yet. So either he is a happy camper or he has taken my earlier advise and tossed the sucker into the trash can. I can tell you that when I used the laptop it wasn’t a great laptop but it did work and I was able to bring up Youtube and surf the web if I kept the open tabs to a small number, just try that using Windows 7.

Check out this article for someone else’s opinion and experiences using Linux.

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Ubuntu Mate