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Using the Rasberry Pi on older PC systems

Former Member

I currently have several laptops a Dell lapstop Inspiron 1501, a Compaq Intel, both are about 7 yrs old and work well. I also have 2 laptops about 15 yrs old Toshiba Techra 8000s that work well for what they are capable of doing. Will the Rasberry PI B attach to these laptops?  The Dell & Compaq can already surf the net, do office functions, watch movies and store quite a bit, but the download times are long. The Toshibas are basically good to type with and email with a little surfing. My question is this will the Rasberry B give them a comparable functionality to newer Laptops?

Parents

  • Short answer: no.

     

    1. No, it will not have the performance of an "new" laptop. Not even a very, very low end one. But probably more performance than the 7 year old laptops. Certainly more than the 15 year olds.

     

    2. It is very unlikely that the HDD in the old laptops connect to the motherboard via USB, so those will be unusable. You'll have to buy a USB HDD to connect to the Pi.

     

    3. It is very unlikely that the LCD in the laptops connects to the motherboard using HDMI. You'll have to connect the Pi to a stand alone HDMI input monitor.

     

    4. It is unlikely, but *possible* (and if so, probably using a non-standard connector) that the track pad and keyboard of the laptops connect to the motherboard with USB. You will have to connect external mice and keyboards to the Pi's.

     

    You can see that at this point it really looks more like road kill than a laptop.

  • in reply to Former Member

    "2. It is very unlikely that the HDD in the old laptops connect to the motherboard via USB, so those will be unusable. You'll have to buy a USB HDD to connect to the Pi."

     

    Actually, no, he doesn't need to buy a new HDD. There are external HDD cases that use the old IDE HDD interface. I have one of those, and my 11 year old laptop's HDD works fine with that one. image

  • in reply to danixdefcon5

    True. Forgot about that. I've kept the old HDDs from discarded laptops and put them in those cases. Kept the old drive as backup for a while for the data migrated to the new system then used them when moving files around.

     

    But the OPs old laptop looks even more like roadkill. image

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