Reviving an Old Laptop with Linux Mint

As I write this on October 28, I got a phone call from someone I had never met before. He’d been referred to me by a mutual friend whom I had helped with a technology problem a couple of weeks ago. This fellow said, “my computer is no longer getting security updates and a technician with my internet service provider thinks i have a virus.. Can you help me?” I said, “How old is your computer?” He said, “It’s eight years old and it’s running Windows 10.” I said, “Windows 10 end of life happened recently, and there’s no way for you to get security updates and/or antivirus protection.” I said, “Are you willing to think differently?”

I told him that I’d be happy to meet with him at our village library at noon, following my early morning gig with Meals on Wheels. He was glad to oblige. I walked into the library and met with my client. He had a Dell Inspiron 15 with a 935-gigabyte hard drive, an i5 CPU, and 8 GB of RAM. I said, “This is an ideal candidate for Linux Mint Cinnamon.” I inserted a USB drive in the laptop and rebooted it. I pressed F12 while it was rebooting, which is the key combination you need to boot from USB with Dell machines. I demonstrated the desktop and explained how easy it would be for him to make the transition. His hard disk had been encrypted so I had to remove the encryption before I could install Linux Mint.

I entered the following command:

$ lsblk

The lsblk command lists block devices like hard drives and SSDs, along with their partitions and mount points, to provide a clear view of the system’s storage structure. Now that I knew the block device information, I wanted to wipe the data and have a clean drive to install Linux Mint on. I used the following command to wipe the data:

$ shred -v -n 3 /dev/sda

I ate my lunch while the process completed. Then I reinserted the USB drive, started the computer, pressed F12, and started up with Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.2 “Zara”, and in about ten minutes, I had a fresh install of Linux on this excellent eight-year-old computer. I called this fellow and told him I could meet him tomorrow at the library to introduce him to his new operating system. He was delighted.

And just like that, an aging laptop found new life—and its owner discovered a fresh path forward. What began as a cold call turned into a warm collaboration rooted in trust, community, and a willingness to embrace change. By choosing Linux Mint, we not only extended the usefulness of his device but also empowered him with a secure, modern operating system free from the constraints of proprietary software. Tomorrow’s meeting at the library won’t just be about learning a new interface—it’ll be about reclaiming digital independence.