Revive your PC

Give your old hardware some extra longevity and beat the fiscal blues. shows you how Windows fails and Linux Mint prevails.

Jonni Bidwell

Spring is upon us northern hemisphere dwellers once again. While many of us busy ourselves cleaning cobwebs from our caves or canal dwellings, others look to the season of rejuvenation as a time for investing in new hardware. That dusty Windows 7 PC under the stairs might be destined for landfill. Or perhaps your Windows 10 machine is struggling and it seems like no amount of cobweb cleaning (actual and metaphorical) will remedy it. Slow PCs are a nightmare to use and we understand the temptation of out with the old and in with the new.

But if ‘the new’ is a new Windows machine, we urge caution. Also, as inflation continues to float at around 10%, many of us can’t afford to be dropping Benjamins (or Charleses) on shiny new computers. But with just a little hardware refresh and the power of open source software, old machines can be granted a new lease of life. And users can be spared the latest privacy incursions and hardware demands of Windows 11.

Linux Mint is easy to install, simple to use and doesn’t (usually–Ed) spy on you. And with a couple of sticks of memory and a solid-state drive (SSD), we’ll show you how it can make your old machine fly (not into a dumpster).

Old hardware vs new software

Microsoft would love you to buy a new Windows 11 PC, but your old hardware can find a new lease of life.

When Windows 10 was released, Microsoft quite clearly said that this would be the final version of the OS. This turned out to be a poor marketing strategy and soon rumours of Windows 11 began to circulate. The software was eventually released at the end of 2021, and many Windows 10 users now live in fear of a phantom forced update to the new release by night.

Windows 10’s hardware requirements were quite low, largely on account of Microsoft understandably wanting to get as much of its userbase on to the same version. If you want to install Windows 11, though, it’s a different story. We can forgive the 4GB of RAM and dual-core, 64-bit processor stipulations – that’s in line with what you’d want to run a modern desktop environment on Linux. We can also forgive 64GB of storage, but only because storage is cheap these days. What draws our ire is the need for UEFI Secure Boot and, in particular, a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 chip. UEFI has been around for a decade (though not everyone likes it), but compatible TPM chips have only gone mainstream over the last five years.

Farewell to Windows

It is possible, via editing of ugly registry keys during installation, to bypass any or all of these requirements. But this isn’t something your average user is going to know how to do. Nor might they want to – such a configuration is unsupported by Microsoft, and it claims “is not entitled to receive updates”. Anecdotal evidence suggests such installs have in fact received security updates, but it’s not at all given that this will continue. The upshot is there’s a whole host of very capable hardware stuck running Windows 10, and when that goes EOL in 2025, that hardware will have to exit the Microsoft ecosystem, one way or another.

We’ve long touted Linux’s ability to run on older hardware, so naturally we implore anyone feeling disgruntled about not qualifying for Windows 11 to give it a whirl. Anything that ran Windows 10 can run Linux Mint without a care. Things are not so simple once we start looking at hardware from previous epochs, though. Up until around 2004, most x86 PCs had 32-bit processors, which is to say that at the lowest levels, they operated on binary ‘words’ 32 bits long. These words were not long enough, so the x86_64 architecture was born, and by 2006, very few 32-bit x86 CPUs were being produced. Windows 10 still supports 32-bit machines, as do many versions of Linux (Debian, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS). However, many popular Linux distros, in particular Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch, do not. We’re going to look at Linux Mint over the page, our go-to distribution for beginners and those fleeing Windows. Mint’s main release is based on Ubuntu, but it has a lesser-known Debian-based release that works much the same way. So, this is what we recommend for your 32-bit boxes.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, but by all means judge Linux Mint by its incredible background selection.