I have a decade-old Dell Inspiron laptop with a 2nd-gen Intel Core i3 processor, 4 GB RAM, and an integrated Intel HD GPU. It came with Windows 7 out of the box and was eventually upgraded to Windows 10. However, after 13 years, it's not the most enthusiastic laptop, and getting anything done on it seems like a task in itself.
Even though Windows 10 is officially dead (unless you signed up for the additional security patch scheme), your hardware doesn't have to go with it. Instead of recycling the PC, I gave it another chance with Damn Small Linux, an OS that famously started as a 50MB experiment and proved you don't need bloated software to run a functional computer.
While the modern version has grown to 700MB to include necessary drivers and applications, it's still tiny enough to breathe life back into old hardware.
