The relentless march of new technology make digital devices obsolete in five years or less. Manufacturers have no incentive to make software and hardware “imporvements” compatible with legacy products. Consequently all of us have old laptops, old phones, and old tablets that won’t accept the latest software upgrades.

Our legacy devices still can do what we bought them for. But if we upgraded to newer operating systems, or later editions of Microsoft Office, they get slow and we get dissatisfied.

What to do? I’ve been experimenting with changing over from Windows and MAC operating systems to Linux. Linux is a non-proprietary system created by the community of developers who release their products for the common good, making them free for all non-commercial uses. It has evolved and branched into a number of different “flavors” that trace their digital genealogy back to the original Linux. Many of these easily install on Legacy devices.

On my old HP laptop that runs Vista, I installed Q4OS and was delighted to find it runs much faster. I added the freeware programs discussed in my earlier blog post and the computer is a servicable tool again.

I was not successful in installing Linux on Marguerite’s seven year old MacBook Pro laptop, so I simply replaced the harddrive with an inexpensive solid state hard drive which is eight times faster. I used Apple’s built in restore feature (Option-R) to put the original version of MAC OS10 back onto the comptuer, in effect making it the same as it was when she purchased it in 2012 – but eight times faster in booting up!

As with the Vista computer, I downloaded and installed the suite of freeware applications to make it fully functional and lightning fast. We’ll be giving that computer away. One of our friends will soon be happily surfing the web, corresponding, collecting photos, and doing all those everyday computer tasks without having to lay out big bucks for a new computer.