 old computers. They're not exactly known for being the highest quality thing in the world most of the time. Of course, there's ThinkPads, but most companies don't really give those out anymore. And this lack of quality and performance is especially apparent when you have one that still runs Windows 7. This is the Toshiba Portage R700-135. It's a relatively powerful machine, especially for its time. It has an 128GB SSD, which is very good. It has a Core i7-620M, which is a little older, but still okay. And it has a seemingly large amount of removable things. I mean, look at this. You can add SD cards with the special little thing. When have you seen that in a lot of laptops? The build quality seems very good. It's made out of metal and not garbage plastic for most components. And it has a 1366x768 resolution display, which isn't actually as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. Another great thing about it is that it has 4GB of RAM, which at least for when it came out is quite a lot of RAM. It's only DDR3, and it's not especially very fast, but you know, it's okay. Doesn't really have any GPU or anything in it, besides the integrated graphics, of course. And if you look at the back, it has an Aputure Science logo. It has removable screws for things like a ThinkPad. So that's very good, along with support for a dock and a removable battery. Thank God for these kind of things. I love removable batteries because these are so much easier to swap out, which is one thing I would recommend if you're planning to use one of these laptops because these batteries deteriorate a lot over time. Something like this isn't gonna last you a long time if you don't upgrade the battery. But anyway, it supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, like a lot of devices of its era. And now let's get straight to what we're gonna do to fix it. When I first tried to turn it on, it gave me an RTC power failure, which is simply caused by the wrong time being set on the computer. Yeah, as you can tell, it's not 2011. For changing the settings in the BIOS, it seems to boot up perfectly fine. We are a very business looking version of Windows 7. So it began asking me for a password and as I encountered the irony that this came in an HP bag, I opened it up only to find that there were a little piece of paper with all the passwords on it. Very secure businessmen, very secure. It soon came to the realization that it expects you to be connected to their internet and they have a sign-in system. So it looks like if we're gonna actually do anything with this computer, we're going to have to change the operating system. So obviously the main thing I would recommend is installing a Linux system, like for example, Linux Mint over here. Just choose one of the desktop environments and download it from one of the mirrors. Download and install a tool like Belina Etcher and plug in a USB to your computer. Then simply select the file you want to flash, select your target and then click Flash. Note that this might take a while, especially if your ISO is a little big. So once it's all flashed, you can just take the USB out, plug it into the computer, empower it on, hold F2 on most devices and you'll enter the BIOS which we used to change the clock before. Now go over to Advanced and go down to Change Boot Order, all of this done with the arrow keys. Press Enter once you reach an option, press Enter to change it and now let's move up the USB disk. So this is our USB. I believe it's F7 to move it up. There you go, F7. Sometimes you'll find the F6 and F5 on some devices but in this case it's F7. Let's press Enter to save that. We're going to go and Escape with the Escape key. Now let's go to Exit and let's go Exit, Saving Changes. Let's do Why. So once you've booted up from the USB, you'll notice you'll get, I mean, you're like this, we're just going to start Linux Mint. Eventually you should be booted into Linux Mint Live and then you can click Install Linux Mint or whatever installer you have for your distribution. At this stage, it's just fairly straightforward. You select your keyboard layout, then you connect to a network. But all of this is for jumps. Real Linux people install real distributions like Arch Linux or Gen 2, where you have to do a manual installation. So instead of doing this far easier and what I would mostly recommend for most users method, let's just go all out and install Arch Linux on this PC from 2011. Yep, this is happening. So after a relatively shortened fast, mostly due to the SSD Arch install, everything seems to work pretty well with the open box window manager. So now that all these boring Linux nerd things are done, how does it actually perform? Let's begin with this basic ffmpeg transcoding test in x265. Of course, it's not the fastest thing on earth, but it is getting, you know, six frames per second, which, you know, isn't the best before a computer from 2011 with this kind of processor. It's sort of what you would expect, especially when you consider x265 is quite new technology doing the same test with x264 yields performance that is around twice as good. So there's that, but you definitely shouldn't be using this for video rendering unless you're really in a pinch. And another thing to talk about is the cooling. If you touch here, you'll die. It's really hot and it gets really hot easily. I might have to clean it out later seems to pass the Minecraft test with relatively stable FPS, never really dropping below 20 unless things get really intensive. Although there is to note, this is only really possible because of various optifying tweaks and really just tricks that make it possible for this game to run on a lot of hardware. So in conclusion, I took a laptop that would have probably been destined for the e-way spin and the power of Linux, I turned it into something that can be used for everyday activities. The reason I'm making this video is because I'm seeing a lot of people instead of doing what I'm doing here, buying new computers and essentially generate more e-waste. Not only is it a waste of money, but it's a great learning experience to install a new operating system on a computer. In fact, the only reason I got into Linux in the first place was exactly this reason to restore older computers. So yeah, unless you genuinely need more powerful hardware, don't buy new hardware. I've been Denji, goodbye.