The Dell that refused to die

I was cleaning up my workshop recently.

There was the usual mess of things I’ve accumulated over time, like pieces of wood, bits of metal, POM, various motor parts and materials that I keep because I might need them someday… you know.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I found an old Dell Latitude E6400, year ca 2009-ish.

I had completely forgotten about it.

It had been sitting there for years. Through summer, winter, humidity, probably everything else you can imagine. I also found the original charger next to it, which was a bit of a surprise.

My first thought was to take it to the recycling centre.

There was no way this thing was still working.

My first thought was to take it to the recycling centre. There was no way this thing was still working. But somewhere in the back of my mind, something kept telling me to try it first.

So I plugged it in and pressed the power button, AND… it started.

I honestly wasn’t expecting that.

I left it charging for about half an hour and then unplugged it. The battery (which is still the original battery) managed another twenty minutes or so.

Twenty minutes! After all those years. That was enough to change my mind.

I decided I wanted to give it another life.

It’s not a particularly impressive machine by today’s standards. It’s an old business laptop, and that’s probably exactly why I like it. It was built to be used, carried around, repaired and used again.

So instead of recycling it, I started cleaning it up and figuring out what I could do with it.

I don’t really know yet how far I’ll take it.

I decided to give it another life.

I went with Debian and XFCE first. It seemed like a sensible choice for an old laptop like this. It worked fine, but it wasn’t quite as snappy as I had hoped.

Then I tried MATE, which felt a bit better.

But, as usual, I somehow ended up with Openbox.

I started building the desktop my own way, keeping only the things I actually wanted and getting rid of everything else. And surprisingly, the old Dell started feeling pretty quick again.

I’ve been testing a few things on it too. FreeCAD works. PrusaSlicer 2.9 works. It’s definitely not fast, and it sometimes needs a little patience, but it still somehow manages to get the job done.

Which is more than I expected when I found it buried under a pile of workshop materials.

So that’s where it is for now.

For now, though, it’s alive.