Howdy DIYers,
I happened across a lovely dell inspirion 8500. They just don’t design laptops like this anymore.

Now, it’s very old. It has RAM in the megabytes, so not really usable these days. I’m wondering if anybody has put a new motherboard or somehow upgraded this or a similar laptop to be decent but still keep the shell.


You can upgrade the CPU (yes it is socketed), ram, and slap an ssd in there. Install Windows 2000 or xp or Linux. It looks like it’s a socket 478 which you could go with a 2.6 ghz pentium 4 and possibly 2gb of ram. It’s ide hard drive though so an ssd might be out of the question. Edit: https://ebay.io/m/AfEWRW
Do this + one of the ultralight Linux distros like puppy or similar and it’d fucking rip