Reviving The Old Dell Mini 10 + Update!

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Back in early 2009, there was a tiny little “cheap” netbook, designed by Dell, to be utilized for simple web browsing and office applications. The hardware was incredibly cheap, however it could easily withstand being knocked around in an elementary or high school student’s bookbag. This was the Dell Mini 10.

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Seeing that I haven’t really done much with the restoration of this old hardware, I feel that it isn’t worth its own project page. Instead, I will document it here in a blog post.

The above picture was what you would originally find this netbook listed as on Dell’s website back in the day.

After upgrading the RAM to the maximum it could utilize, 2GB, installing a little SSD I had laying around and throwing Linux Mint 32-bit on it, we now have a cheap little Chromebook replacement. My goal in the future is to use a Pinebook Pro instead of this little guy or my x360 HP chromebook. I intend on giving away the Dell Mini 10 and the HP Chromebook to others who have more use for them, but for now, this chromecasts fine to the TV.

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Now, above, we have the output of an application called “Neofetch” that, in my opinion, should come standard with most Linux Distributions. If interested in doing the same as I have done, feel free to reach out to the Linux Reddit, as they’re very helpful to newcomers looking to recycle some old hardware.

As we can see here, I have installed Linux Mint on this. It is a very lightweight operating system, and much more secure than the aging Windows 7 Starter that was installed on here.

Microsoft is abandoning Windows 7 if I recall correctly, and Linux allows users to own their hardware without relying on needless Microsoft spyware. The goal of this was to outfit the little netbook with a barebones operating system that auto-launched Chrome whenever you started it up. As we can see under the “Memory” section of the output, this OS uses VERY LITTLE memory at idle. Even when casting informative Youtube videos to the TV, it still only gets up to about 1gb.

That’s the news regarding the Dell Mini 10 that I revived, however I’d also like to add that I’ll be working on some Terraform code going forward for a senior design project!