hi, do you own an old laptop?
A laptop that cannot install current operating systems like Windows 10 or Windows 11
In this video I will show you how to turn it into a raspbian laptop
You can browse the web, watch YouTube or turn it into a network monitoring server and much more
Let's get started
I have here a Dell laptop that is more than 10 years old and cannot run Windows 10
It has 2GB of RAM
To make it a raspbian laptop you need a USB stick with at least 4GB
So what operating system will we install for this old laptop?
That operating system is Raspberry Pi Desktop
This operating system was created mainly for Raspberry Pi devices
Raspberry Pi is a compact device but you can use it for many different purposes such as mini computer,
network monitor, smart mirror, smart home and many more.
Fortunately for us Raspberry Pi OS has a computer version that is Raspberry Pi Desktop
This operating system can be installed on older computers and cannot install modern operating systems such as Windows 10 or Windows 11
You can download the installer from raspberrypi.com
My favorite USB installation tool is Rufus
There are a lot of tools to create USB installers but I highly recommend Rufus and you won't be disappointed with it.
You open the Rufus tool, select the USB stick, then select the raspbian OS installer iso file downloaded in the previous step.
It also helps you create Windows 11 installers on older computers that don't support TPM 2.0
But with a 10 year old computer, I recommend that you do not try to install Windows 11 operating system because you will be disappointed.
Rufus will erase all your data on the USB stick so make sure you back up important data before doing this
It will take about 10 minutes to complete your desired USB stick
When you receive the Ready message, you have succeeded
Be sure to safely remove the USB stick to avoid damaging your installer
You bring the USB stick plugged into the target laptop and start installing the operating system
To install the operating system from a USB stick you set the boot order in the BIOS
With my laptop to access the BIOS I press the F2 key on boot
Maybe with your laptop will use another key eg Delete key
You observe the computer boot screen you will get the answer if you want to access the BIOS
By default, the computer boots from the hard drive, I will change it to a USB stick
After you have corrected the boot order, save the changes and restart the computer
A Raspbian OS installation screen appears with different options
Select the keyboard type, I leave it as default
Here you choose No
There are two ways to install, one is the command line, the other is the graphical interface
Selecting graphical settings is probably the better option for most people
Next is to select the hard drive and format it
There will be two hard drives appear, one is the laptop's hard drive,
the other is a USB stick containing the operating system installer
You choose Yes to start formatting and partitioning the hard drive
You'll get a warning that all the data on your hard drive will be destroyed, but with my old computer,
there's no more important data on it.
Please note to install the loader for the operating system in this step
You choose the hard drive to install the loader on
Usually you install to /dev/sda
The older your computer is, the longer it will take to install the raspbian operating system
As in my case it will take about 20 minutes to complete the OS installation
When the operating system installation is complete, you access the BIOS and set the boot order
You let the computer boot from the hard drive
You can now remove the USB stick from your laptop
A welcome screen of the Raspberry Pi Desktop operating system appears letting you know you have successfully installed it
You choose the country where you live
Turning an old laptop into a useful computer is almost done
Take a few more steps
Next you will be asked to create an operating system login account
After creating the login account, the computer starts to connect to the internet
Because the wireless card is still working fine so I connect to the internet using wifi
I set the wifi password as iloveyou3000, do you know what movie it appeared in
You will restart the computer again to complete the final steps
So I have installed the Raspberry Pi Desktop operating system on my old laptop
On the Raspberry Pi OS, some basic software is installed such as office software, Web browser
What you can do with Raspbian laptop
You can browse the web, watch YouTube and there's something special that you can't do on Windows operating system
When you use Raspberry Pi you have to add monitor, mouse, keyboard but with old laptop you already have everything you need
That is you can install open source in applications on it
As here I install the Observium network monitoring application
Installing Observium is quite simple, you just need to copy and paste three commands and you're done
If you have an old laptop, hope this video will be a useful suggestion for you
Thank you for watching, hope you can help me complete 500K subscriptions