Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
2 gigs of ram is going to be incredibly rough in 2025. Linux is better on old hardware but those specs are pretty optimistic.
This image is at least 10 years old
It's at most 9 years old, as it mentions Ubuntu 16.4.
But they put Ubuntu on it
Dude, a single chrome take is going to nom the fuck out of 2gigs.
That's correct, but you can use such low end device as your home server with services like PiHole/AdGuardHome, Invidious, Vaultwarden.
One of my low end home lab server is running invidious (YouTube front-end) on Ubuntu server 24 and just using about 900 MB RAM.
Love the “Installed and tested by Tim G.”
Hey bro you got Tim G. PC too?
Thanks Tim!
That's probably okay if all you want to do is browse the web.
But with an Intel celeron you're not going to get very far even if you do have a more efficient operating system.
Well it is a $20 computer. I can imagine it serving as someone's introduction to Linux because "why not, it's cheap enough for an experiment".
Or not inflicting windows 11 on grandma.
You can make it work with group policy. I do whatever grandma wants.
Also bold of you to assume grandma is tech illiterate. I've met some "grandma age" people who are absolute wizards with tech.
Yeah the grandma I had in mind was the one that only uses her computer for bejeweled and to email you racist memes from Facebook.
If it's a grandma it's going to have to have enough RAM to hold the 984 Chrome tab she assists on having open at any one time. It's going to need at least a terabyte of RAM.
You can get better hardware for free
Go to some companies in your area and ask for some old hardware. They probably have a bunch of 6/7/8th machines. They probably all have 8gb of ram and you can buy cheap sata SSDs that will vastly outperform a old beat up hard drive.
Oof, the web isn't as light as it used to be. Some websites won't even OPEN now with <2GB of RAM. Yes, it is that sloppy.
It's a 20$ PC. Fair enough, I say.
Not really as you can get quite a lot for not much money
I dub thee, sexbox, and she won't leave me like all the other women did.
*Browse Wikipedia
My husband says eMachines have a pretty common capacitor problem. It's an easy fix to remove and replace for people who know how.
Before selling, the capacitors should be visually checked, at minimum, because they can leak and that's no good.
that’s most older electronics in some way shape or form, tho. i’d hope any reseller with space for shelves of product is doing a good look-over of everything they put up. or selling it with a disclaimer/nonguarantee.
All capacitors fail but items from around the time e machines were selling have capacitor plague and are thus more likely to fail.
It isn't limited to just eMachines
Most of the Windows XP age hardware I've seen in the last few years as been dead due to capacitor failure.
This may as well be porn to me.
I had an exact machine like this, with these specs, just with an internal Nvidia GPU and 4 extra video cards added. Using USB splitters and USB audio cards, we made that computer work for 5 users simultaneously.
Built software for initial setup (what USB mouse and KB goes with what monitor?) and it worked like a charm.
There was even enough ram available to run a single virtual box instance with Windows XP (I believe) for one single user.
The Linux desktop was skinned to look like Windows XP too and for class rooms we used... I forgot the name, some open source classroom management system where the teacher could guide students remotely
Linux is awesome
These days I would pair that with Debian and IceWM
2gb of ram really isn't enough
At least give them something usable. I see a lot of 6th gen machines on the market and they can be loaded with 8/16gb of ram.
When quarantines hit and everyone was communicating via zoom, I offered to recycle people's computers and destroy their old hard drives for free. I'd remove and drill multiple holes through the hard drives, vacuum/dust the computer, install a small, inexpensive HDD, and install Ubuntu.
Then I'd install zoom and chrome (sorry) and then pair each computer with a wired mouse, keyboard, and webcam that I had laying around in bulk. Then I'd drop these computers off at shelters, elder communities, and religious institutions. Essentially, anywhere you'd find someone who didn't have the means to contact family, attend an interview, or whatever.
Recycling/upcycling old computers isn't just good for the environment and your investment, it's good for your community!
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