re-use co-workers old laptop

cryptearth · 2026-05-30 09:46:11

hey there everyone
a co-worker got a new laptop for his father-in-law and asked me for help
so i offered it by looking for a new one fitting thier needs and we got a decent one for a good price
as "compensation" they offered me to keep the old one (after getting the old drive out and transfer thier data onto the new one)
as we had several topics in the past of mostly laptops not play nice with linux i struggle if it will be worth it
the one i'm supposed to get is a HP 17-ca2521ng - S/N: 5CG119676W
to spare you the search:
cpu: amd athlon silver 3050U (2 core 2 threads 2.2ghz base)
igpu: Radeon Vega 3
dgpu: none listed
ram: 1x 8gb (shared)
drive: sata ssd (some 1tb toshiba one, replacing the slow 5400rpm hdd)
lan: realtek gigabit (rtl8168 family)
wifi: realtek rtl8821ce
bios: not checked yet, maybe already update by windows update, hp lists last from late 2023

the last laptop i owned had an intel/nvid combo with the dgpu not correctly supported by the 390 driver - never got it working oroperly and just used windows - until my cat managed to break the display - nvm - the battery was dead anyway

the question: does someone has experience with this series? what i'm about to expect with arch? or i better with just win10/11?
would love to take it - free device - and according to its serial it's from january 2022 but just on the low budget side
as it only has tge one igpu it should work out if the box?

thanks for any reply

Last edited by cryptearth (2026-05-30 10:08:36)

Lone_Wolf · 2026-05-30 11:49:59

That cpu is from 2020 so the laptop is not that old.

It probably doesn't qualify for windows 11 (no TPM2) and win10 is end-of-life.

Does it have a Full HD 1920x1080 screen or a lower res ?

5hridhyan · 2026-05-30 12:35:18

I have no experience with that exact model, but I've had a pretty good experience with a HP laptop, before I start ranting about HPs, here are my thoughts:
Given the hardware it should be fine for basic web browsing, "light" development/coding ,media, document etc.

8 GB RAM can vary a bit, like sometimes the firmware/BIOS reserves a chunk for the iGPU, and sometimes the graphics memory is borrowed dynamically from system RAM(like the firmware may reserve part of system RAM for the iGPU, on my HP 247 G8 the amdgpu driver reports a 2 GiB VRAM reservation, leaving roughly 6 GiB usable from 8 GiB installed. Some systems reserve less and rely more heavily on dynamically shared memory, so the exact amount depends on the firmware and laptop model...),
not saying it'll be the same on your machine, but I never found an option in the BIOS to change the allocation ....

a question: does it have a single RAM slot or two? A RAM upgrade could improve overall "performance" quite a bit, at least by 2026 standards

the amdgpu driver is waaayy more mature on linux, at least what I've seen on the BSD side. I can't comment on hibernation, but suspend just works fine on my machine
over all works out the box in the software sense

I have the same Ethernet controller family and it just works. (to be fair, I think I've only used it once...) my wifi card is an RTL8822CE and it works fine out of the box. I don't have any experience with the RTL8821CE though.

so if your main concern is "Will Arch run properly on this machine?", I'd say the odds are quite good, the machine is far more limited by the dual core athlon and 8 GB RAM than by linux compatibility

Edit:
for a free laptop? worth taking it

Last edited by 5hridhyan (2026-05-30 13:23:17)

seth · 2026-05-30 13:43:10

rtl8821ce:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305395
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=312139
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293187

Do you really want to use windows? If no: just make linux work on the thing
RAM-wise it very much depends on the kind of environment you intend to run, for a simple desktop + some office 8GB is actually still plenty enough.
Latest resource hog DE, 5 browsers with 250 tabs each? You're gonna need more RAM

topcat01 · 2026-05-30 17:56:01

I often find myself in a similar situation, and have acquired a few old machines. Some of them are much older than yours. With i3/sway and Linux, 8 GB is totally usable for most tasks. Every time I encounter Windows it's a sadistic/hellish experience (and I'm very familiar with Windows because I configure and support our dev environment at work) and I'd never curse my own machines with that nonsense.

Last edited by topcat01 (2026-05-30 17:56:22)

cryptearth · 2026-05-30 18:30:45

sorry for the wall - reply got longer then expected
appreciate all of you

Lone_Wolf wrote:

(no TPM2) and win10 is end-of-life.
Does it have a Full HD 1920x1080 screen or a lower res ?

it does have a tpm2 - but going "Chris Titus' Install Windows ... the Arch way" using DISM to just extract the install.wim instead of using the installer and using local account (by using a 24 image without tge recent patches to block this) even a "missing" (disabled) tpm2 isn't a hard requirement to get win11 fully working
it only has a 1600x900 panel - but i'm actually quite used to this size and resolution on mobile hardware - so no problem here, aside from having just one screen instead of three

5hridhyan wrote:

8 GB RAM can vary a bit, like sometimes the firmware/BIOS reserves a chunk for the iGPU, and sometimes the graphics memory is borrowed dynamically from system RAM
not saying it'll be the same on your machine, but I never found an option in the BIOS to change the allocation ....
a question: does it have a single RAM slot or two?
I have the same Ethernet controller family and it just works. (to be fair, I think I've only used it once...) my wifi card is an RTL8822CE and it works fine out of the box. I don't have any experience with the RTL8821CE though.
Edit:
for a free laptop? worth taking it

it does reserve 2gb fixed for the igpu without any option to change that
according to HP's docs they rely on the amd gpu driver to maybe offload additional ram at runtime - not sure if this is exclusive to windows
it also has a 2nd slot - so upgrade is an option - but there's no xmp setting - so i either have to get another module match the installed on or get a kit
i wasn't able to test the nics yet
well, "free" as in "we don't have any need for it - keep it as compensation for your help"
i'm actually quite close with my co-worker and already helped him with his own pc
I'm also known among friends to be "that one pc nerd" and have somewhat of a quite positive reputation when it comes to tech stuff

seth wrote:

rtl8821ce:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305395
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=312139
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293187
Do you really want to use windows? If no: just make linux work on the thing
RAM-wise it very much depends on the kind of environment you intend to run, for a simple desktop + some office 8GB is actually still plenty enough.
Latest resource hog DE, 5 browsers with 250 tabs each? You're gonna need more RAM

ah ... these are the kind of issues i was hoping to not see - thanks for pointing it out - i may refer back to it
currently i suffer from have misplaced the target ssd to be installed - likely one of those "have you looked at X?" while already had it in hand three times
it's not like i want to go for windows - but in the past i only had hardware with nvidia gpu and often intel cpu which require some stunts to get working
given that this is all amd with only a single gpu i hope to avoid common pitfalls like gpu-switching-magic

topcat01 wrote:

I often find myself in a similar situation, and have acquired a few old machines. Some of them are much older than yours. With i3/sway and Linux, 8 GB is totally usable for most tasks. Every time I encounter Windows it's a sadistic/hellish experience (and I'm very familiar with Windows because I configure and support our dev environment at work) and I'd never curse my own machines with that nonsense.

well - i'm not fully against giving older hardware another chance - but from many topics i read here most seek for advice for pre-2020 hardware - and for such old hardware my opinion is: if you want to keep using old hardware stick to era matching software but don't expect the newest kernels to work without issues
it will likely end up like my last one: a likely dual boot so i can enjoy linux but have windows available when needed
on my last one dual booting helped: i was tasked to rip a old music cd and while windows refused due to copy protection opensuse just ripped it without comment
most "severe" issue i often encounter is as all around me use windows i have a 2tb external drive formatted with exfat for easy share between the two worlds - i hope one day the windows implementation of ZFS becomes actual usable - as of now its dev still considers it alpha-quality mostly due to windows not really actual supporting other filesystem implementations than what it comes with

seth · Yesterday 06:49:16

my opinion is: if you want to keep using old hardware stick to era matching software but don't expect the newest kernels to work without issues

Wrong. I think we had that
There've been few changes to the overall architecture and linux just only deliberates to remove ISA network drivers, https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Old-Network-AI

Unless arch decides to mandate sse > 3 you should™ be able to run it on any x86_64 cpu, starting w/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Prescott

As a matter of fact, brand new HW tends to cause *more* problems because the drivers have not been inlined/developed.

What you can not expect on old hardware are performance wonders and that means problems w/ a lot of userspace processes that has higher demands notably for the GPU - trying to run plasma or gnome on chips before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_I … units#Gen4 will not be fun for sure.

Arch Linux

#1 2026-05-30 09:46:11

re-use co-workers old laptop

#2 2026-05-30 11:49:59

Re: re-use co-workers old laptop

#3 2026-05-30 12:35:18

Re: re-use co-workers old laptop

#4 2026-05-30 13:43:10

Re: re-use co-workers old laptop

#5 2026-05-30 17:56:01

Re: re-use co-workers old laptop

#6 2026-05-30 18:30:45

Re: re-use co-workers old laptop

#7 Yesterday 06:49:16

Re: re-use co-workers old laptop

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