Linux Mint Laptop
April 6th, 2025
At the end of March, my parents gave me a laptop they had found. It was a Lenovo Ideapad 330S, and refused to turn on. They told me I could keep it regardless if I got it working or not. I happily took it and immediately knew what I was going to do to it: purge it of the evil Windows 10 OS it had and install Linux on it. My homelab and Steam Deck got me on a big Linux kick, and I really am getting tired of Windows.
As soon as I got it home and cleaned it up, I knew I had to do whatever I could to get it to work.
Why, you may ask?
(In reality, it's mainly because the the laptop was blue and in decent condition.)
Once I was done cleaning it, I got it charging.
I didn't have a charger for it, but I used an adjustable power supply that luckily had the right plug for it.
Once I got it charged, I figured out why my parents had given it to me; the Windows on it was fully corrupted.
Whoever used it last did something to the system, and the system was not happy.
I then tried to get Linux installed on the laptop. I have never done this before, so a brief Google search later I found Linux Mint. I got the ISO on a USB drive and gave flashing the system with the new OS a shot. It barely worked, but it did run. However, it couldn't find the 1 terabyte drive and said the system was nearly at max capacity already. That's when I discovered that the main SSD was super small, like only 8 gigabytes. The laptop would take ages to load and was barely usable.
So that put the project on hold for a bit. I wanted to get a bigger SSD for the primary driver, and I planned to get some RAM for it too since it had an open slot. One weekend and a Microcenter trip later, I had a 500 gigabyte SSD and 24 gigabytes of RAM. I installed the new parts, got Linux Mint on it, and have been using that laptop ever since.
I'm still very happy with the outcome of this project. Granted, I sunk more money (and time) into it than I really should have, but now I have a good laptop to mess around with. Heck, it's what I used to write this article and the whole site! It's weird to me that I'd enjoy such a simple laptop, but I am too used to my gaming rig, Steam Deck, or the complexity that is my homelab. It's just nice to have a laptop that's easy to move around and just worked right away!