One of my recent posts discussed installing Puppy Linux on an ancient laptop (P1-266/80MB RAM) I had. After a couple of weeks of use, I have found myself using it exclusively for remote connection to my much faster desktop machine, even when I am only browsing the Internet.

The reason I do this is because the laptop’s extremely limited power has trouble browsing modern websites as the CPU runs at ~75% just to render the CSS. This is no fault of the OS or the browser, just lack of horsepower by the machine. So when I remote connect to my desktop machine using the included Linux RDP client, I can browse with all the speed of my desktop.

Of course, there are a couple of drawbacks being the color spectrum is limited and a very slight (almost unnoticeable) bit of lag. Still, the benefits of this far outweigh the negatives.

The point of this post being,  don’t pass up a cheap or free old laptop because it can’t run your current OS of choice well. You can set up your primary machine as a remote connection server and use the laptop to connect from anywhere in the World. This beats buying a new laptop and having the hassle of transferring the files back and forth.