On Refurbishing Old Laptops With Linux

I'm working on a plan to refurbish donated laptops for low-income senior citizens, and my first proof of concept didn't go very well. It was a Windows 8 machine that surely cost not more than $500 when it was new. Couldn't tell you the processor offhand but it was a dual core 64-bit, so, an i3 or even a Celeron perhaps. 4GB of RAM.

And it wasn't running great, but it was snappier than you'd expect if you've grown used to how even capable machines run heavy ass Windows 11. I figured putting Linux on it would breathe some new life into it and chose Mint XFCE to keep it both senior-usable but also graphically lightweight. But it took aaaages to install, and was actually pretty sluggish once deployed.

So I figured the HDD was probably cooked, and I popped in a Kingston SSD. The installation also took just as long (by vibe; I didn't time it…knew I should have). And once installed, again, it felt just as sluggish.

During this process somewhere I also conflated my variables and put in another 4GB of RAM, confident that between that and the SSD it would perform better. For comparison, I have a 19 year old ThinkPad running 32-bit Debian and it was snappier than this thing.

Now I say that I wonder if it wasn't a 32 bit version of Windows 8. I believe such a thing existed but did OEMs ship it? Would a 64 bit Mint have even installed on that machine if the processor was 32 bit?

Anyway, I'm mostly just trying to get conversation started around here. I'll keep playing with the machines I have available when there is time. Even if it's a 64 bit processor I may try and load Debian 32 bit on there and see what happens.

Curious what anyone thinks / what I may be overlooking. I just can't fathom that any Windows version, even 8, would be running better than Mint XFCE but here we are.