Today’s thriftstore find: an Acer Aspire One mini-notebook, circa 2009 (1gb RAM that I boosted to 2gb cuz I had some laying around, 130gb HD, 1.6GHz 32-bit processor, WinXP Home, 3-cell battery, no power cord but the one from my Acer notebook works). The physical size is 10″ x 7″ (screen diameter around 11″, 1200×600). It’d just been put out on the floor right in front of me so it didn’t stay on the shelf more than 20 seconds, yo.
And so the first thing I did after the memory upgrade was replaced WinXP with April’s solid release of Lubuntu 18.04, which was made for devices like this. WiFi and browsing work, webcam is decent, and the battery is full now; the online reviews of this hardware are very positive and under Linux it’s fast. Now if only the keyboard was made for the fingers of a nondainty grownup…