I thought it might be fun to try to get the twelve-year-old Dell Latitude X1 laptop up and running. My expectations were not high, but when I looked over the hardware specs I found the out-of-date hardware surprisingly within reason to run current software.

The computer came with Windows XP, which is long out of service. The previous owner of this laptop switched to running Ubuntu 11. Since that’s far out of date as well and I had no login information anyway, a clean wipe is in order.

I thought I’d jump straight to the latest Ubuntu 17.10, but was unable to find a 32-bit installer. The lack of a 32-bit installer turns out to be an intentional omission, part of Ubuntu’s plans to phase out 32-bit support. So I installed an older version (16.04 LTS) which did have a 32-bit installer, and upgraded from there. The resulting system was quite sluggish. After using it a bit, I decided part of the problem was the spinning-platter hard drive but there’s also the old graphics chip struggling to handle the visual effects of a modern OS.

To isolate the latter, I installed Ubuntu MATE, a variant of Ubuntu with the MATE desktop. MATE is a simpler alternative which is supposed to run better on lower-end hardware. That part was true – after installing Ubuntu MATE, the Latitude X1 didn’t spend as much chugging through graphical transitions. But the overall experience was still slow – the spinning platter hard drive remains a significant influence on performance.

Switching to MATE would have made a larger difference if I had a larger screen (or multiple monitors) running multiple windows. But since the Latitude X1 screen was so small, I only have one window at a time running full-screen, reducing the influence of the desktop environment.

The Latitude X1’s performance on modern software is held back by the spinning-platter hard drive. Which led to the next idea: can we upgrade the hard drive to a SSD? I have a few old SSDs available for such a project.

Dell always publishes excellent manuals for working with their machines. They also keep them online and available, even for twelve-year old machines. So getting to the hard drive was no problem. As soon as the hard drive was visible, though, I knew I was in trouble. The drive is much smaller than the standard laptop hard drive.

Even if the SSD could physically fit, it did not have the correct data interface. The interface connector is unlike anything I’ve seen in a laptop hard drive. The closest thing I can recall is a CompactFlash connector.

The label on the drive proclaims itself to be a Toshiba MK3006GAL. Sadly, unlike Dell, Toshiba does not keep documentation online for old hardware. I remain ignorant of the details and industry specification for this specific hard drive interface and form factor. Maybe it is rare enough that there would be no SSD upgrade possible at all. Since I was not planning to spend money on this project, though, the details are irrelevant. This old computer will stick with its old spinning platter hard drive.

If I had to make a prediction 12 years ago about how well the Latitude X1 would hold up to the years, I probably would have predicted the CPU speed as the largest bottleneck, followed by the quantity of RAM. I would not have guessed that the growth of cheap tablets would demand that operating systems continue to run on a 1 gigahertz processor and within 1 gigabyte of RAM.

I also would not have guessed that solid state drives would have dropped in price and become such a cost-effective boost to overall system performance. The hard drive turned out to be the most significant sign of age in this twelve-year-old laptop.