A while back I saw a listing for batches of laptops being sold from a computer recycler. These machines were being sold as “we don’t know if they work, they’re not what we usually sell, but you’re welcome to try to fix them”. So I thought to keep up my repair skill and to have a test laptop or two I would pick up a batch and give it a try. Couple odd days later I received the lot and most of them were just generic consumer ultra basic laptops and most of them, surprisingly, powered right up without an issue.
Most of the machines were low end consumer laptops with not much noteworthy; under-powered CPU’s, barely enough memory, mechanical hard drives, all wrapped up in a “budget friendly” package. Having the wind knocked out of sails of my epic test lab dreams (not sure what I was expecting out of the lot anyway) I decided to pivot my plans slightly. In October of 2025 Microsoft will be cutting off Windows 10, meaning that whole lot of machines just like these that I bought will be effectively eWaste and thrown in the trash. So I decided to amend my testing plans just slightly to find out if these machine would still be usable for most things … just without Windows.
I pulled out the first laptop an Acer Aspire 7741, it was not spectacular with an Intel Pentium P6000 processor (2 core 1.87ghz) and 6 gigs of RAM. To establish some kind of number that I could use to give others an IDEA of what the machine performed like (that is they could run the same tool on their own computer to get a number that could be compared to get a feel of better or worse) I would use GeekBench. (Note: this is not an endorsement for one tool or another, just the tool that I thought would be usable on the most platforms and be reasonably priced.)
To get started, I had installed a 120GB SSD to the machine and install Linux Mint and then ran a performance scan.
The results were not the most remarkable numbers ever, but the machine was definitely usable. I thought that numbers alone really did not mean a whole lot, so I would throw some things at it and see how the machine did.
I could search on the web, watch Youtube, and play a simple clicker game … But could I do anything useful?
So, it would not win any awards, but this Acer Aspire 7741 was not eWaste and was very usable based on the tests I threw at it. I enjoyed this first test and think I will write more of these, help in my small way to show that someone does not need the latest and greatest machine just to get on the internet and do basic things. Ultimately I will toss this machine on eBay, and I need a better testing process moving forward …