I just picked up a dell latitude D510 at a fleamarket for $15, installed slackware 14.1 stable with MLED on it and then upgraded the ram to 1gb. I've used inspiron's in the past, this is my first time with a latitude and I have to say I'm impressed with it.

I also got an old inspiron laptop for $10 and it looks like someone beat the heck out of it... cracked in two places, I'm going to try installing slack on the inspiron tomorrow and see how it goes.

Both laptops were made for XP and both work nicely. Well, the fact that they turn on surprises me, especially the inspiron.

I have this hobby :^)
I mainly stick with Thinkpads though.
To be sure, by now the mainboard battery and thermal paste are spent on those things.
They could surely use a fan/intake grill dust-out too.
I split open the plastic casing on the batteries, pry off the contacts, stick a new battery between the contacts and wrap it tightly in electrical tape. Good as new!
I'm always pleased to see people refurbishing "old" machines, especially laptops as the power savings are still pretty good bang/buck-wise.
Older lappys make great kiddos 1st computers too!

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The latitudes are decent machines.
I have my current 6420, kids have a D620 and D630, I have a D420 and C400. I bought the c400 in 2002 and it can still Slack alongside the newer ones.

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I liked them too, but sadly the D620/D630 with Nvidia graphics are timebombs and will break eventually. Unless you never play games, so they always stay cool.

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My d630 would have video problems even when not playing games, thats why it got replaced as a server

I've been happy with my Latitudes over the years. Used them since the C600, through the D series, and on my 8th or 9th in the E series now (currently have 2). Maybe not the absolute greatest, they've always been easy to support, usually were decent looking, came with the option of having a tolerable LCD (1024x768 or 1366x768 is NOT tolerable IMO, it's unusably low), and once upon a time were easy to upgrade. They also, since they were business oriented, rarely came with Broadcom wireless, which means their wireless almost always worked with just a firmware install and nothing else (intel).

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I guess it depends on the screen size. On a typical laptop 15.4" screen that resolution is approximately the same dpi as my 22" 1920x1080 external monitor. Until such a time as all the GUI app developers get their act together with regard to UI element scaling for high dpi screens it's probably not a bad idea to stick with ~100dpi. A 1920x1080 on a 12" laptop screen would end up with unusably small icons with many of today's apps/desktops (though I dare say the text fonts would look very sharp at that dpi).

I'm quite happy with it so far. Does anyone know if it will use more than two gbs of ram? I've seen differing replies on the subject when looking to see what the max amount of ram it would be able to take. Some sites say that it will only take 2gbs.

Usually a Google Search will render a few PDFs on the system specs to find out what it will support. Usually manufacturer spec sheets are the best ones.

I saw a listing for 2 1gig ram sticks on ebay I think for 10 bucks.
For 15 bucks. The price of a 12 pack of beer or 2 cans of good coffee.

You did not do too bad in my view.

In case you only need to add the extra 1 gig stick since you already replaced it with one gig of ram.

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I usually do a search on a memory site like http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compat.../latitude-d510

For me anything above 11" I cannot use anything ending in 768. Must be ????x900 or greater. Larger than 13" must be ????x1080 or greater. Anything lower than those resolutions and everything is far too large for me. But my personal tastes. I realize not everyone agrees since they still make and sell 15" laptops with 1366x768 resolution.

Thats the only reason I got rid of my netbook, 1024x600 just wasn't useable.

I still have mine because I know how to use the Ctrl - + key combo as well as the
Alt key - left click - drag method. Not a big deal.

I have an Inspiron 600m, I found kingspec pata ssd that doesn't support trim.

Does secure-delete or some dd zerofill free space command or bleachbit 'wipe free space' do same thing as trim?

I got the drive just to see if it'll work and how well.

Thanks