I have an old DELL Inspiron 9300 and it’s too old to put Windows on it. But the screen is great and I think it’s good to be used as a Chromebook.
So I decided to install a Linux on it. At first, I was going for Ubuntu because it is the default Linux desktop OS. But I was a little bit worry about my old Inspiron hardware for the Unity UI. So I went for Lubuntu which has a lightweight UI but also official recognition as a formal member of the Ubuntu family. It means it should works as the same as Ubuntu but less hardware requirement.
Ok, here is my installation experience.
- USB installation is not working. Basically it got a ‘boot error’ when my DELL try to load the boot disk from USB. I didn’t go deep for this because my hardware is too old and I would switch to CD-ROM instead.
- Install from CD. A normal 700M CD is not big enough for the Lubuntu ISO image and I have to burn it into a DVD instead. It’s not a big deal.
- Finally I can see the Lubuntu setup progress is running.
- One issue, the “Continue button” is gray out in “installation type” screen and you have to click ‘Back’ button then “Continue” again to bypass it.
After this, everything was going smooth and I got my Inspiron with the latest Lubuntu Linux in it. And I tried the machine for a couple hours and I could not feel this is a ten years old machine. The response is reasonable fast and the memory usage is less than 400M for my 2G RAM machine.
I believe this give my old DELL laptop a new life 🙂
Tao's experience 
hello, was wondering if you ran into any further issues such as wifi, video playback/quality, it being slow, error messages, or anything? lol. Tomorrow im trying to bring an inspiron 9300 back to life for a 30-40 year old lady,and dont know how much experience her or her husband have with computers, and i cant physically asist them with any future problems they live 2 hrs away. going to test Lubuntu and Xubuntu on this beast. wish meh luck foo
In fact I will suggest you install LXLE instead which is base on Lubuntu but much ‘Windows’ like UI and with more pre-install necessary softwares. I have no issue with any hardware with my Inspiron 9300. Good luck, man.