Can This USB Stick Resurrect Your Old PC?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,439 words · ~12 min read
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let's play a little make-believe game shall we let's say that i'm
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your grandmother and here i am on my computer that you put together for me oh
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i don't know 10-12 years ago and the hardware was pretty good then but these
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days it's running a tick slow so you know i'm
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just doing grandmotherly things like uh
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firing up the internets to
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browse the web oof
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catching up on my tech tech news
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maybe i open up a couple of tabs gotta get that news from all the sources
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oh boy are these still loading is this tab still loading
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maybe i'll watch a video in the meantime with the vlc
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look at that right click delay isn't that a thing of beauty there it is and
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while i'm waiting for that maybe i'll enjoy a nice little game of pinball
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in 3d
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okay i think you see where we're going with this it's time for grand to finally
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give in to your incessant nagging and upgrade the old machine but then just as
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she's about to do it she's browsing the facebook and she finds an ad for oh
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thank you
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the extra pc which claims to breathe new life into
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old computers for anywhere from 49.99 to
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79.99 but could it be the magic bullet that it
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claims to be or is it just another predatory product designed to take money
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from the elderly and tech illiterate there's only one way for us to find out
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oh after this message from glasswire with glasswire you can instantly see
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your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving
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apps on Windows and Android use offer code Linus to get 25 off glasswire at
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the link below
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alright so my understanding is there's a few different oh Anthony's in the video
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hi my understanding is there's a few different versions of the extra pc so
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i'm holding the extra pc pro
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64 Gigabyte and this is the one we spent 80 us dollars on right and then you've
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got i've got the turbo 32 which is much smaller
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and i spent i think 49.99 on it okay not too bad now something that's immediately
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noticeable about these things is that these are just
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i mean this one they didn't even cover up the branding this is just a sandisk
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cruiser blade cruiser blade 32 gig so that's a usb 2 and this would cost you
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somewhere in the neighborhood it can't be more than like 10 bucks yeah roughly
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and then this i mean they did they put a sticker on
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this one at least i'm just gonna okay
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ah there we go and this one's a cruiserglide 3.0 64 gig
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so that's usb 3 but for our particular old computer we're not going to get any
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any benefit out of that anyway yeah we only have 2.0 okay but i mean they're
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probably i mean i'm sure they sort of tell people that no really nope they
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just say that it gives you speed large storage capacity and file res software
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what is file res software i'm guessing it's some kind of recovery software
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also check out these uh was prices anywhere from 50 to 160 dollars
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yup this thing better be amazing all right so should we just should we just
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crack it open let's fire this thing up sure let's do it uh oh
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yeah you know what
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and you're done bud okay so do you want to do the turbo one
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anyway just because then we get we can see what that file res software
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is all about i think it's identical otherwise okay cool
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what what is this like a core two quad or something uh no it's a pentium d
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well let's uh let's see if if it can make this feel snappy then
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maybe there's something to it all right extra pc they've got their own
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boot logo they did an fs check on the actual hard drive please choose a
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password for your administrator account well i'm going to go with password
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because i need something i can remember in order to begin using all the great
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features we need to set up a few additional applications these applications require that you are
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connected to the internet so they can be downloaded and installed and it looks
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like oh i assumed that was network but it oh it is
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wired connection one it looks like it picked up both our
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wired and wi-fi nicks yep okay
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both real tech all right let's go ahead and do this do
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you accept the eula for vlc media player
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rhythm box media player ubuntu restricted add-ons
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adobe flash okay this is all stuff that i would probably install yep okay
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okay so everything gets installed to the extra pc usb stick and it does not use
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your hard drive fascinating
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well based on how long it's taking to install fonts
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uh we might be asking for a lot so you would probably recognize this what
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is this based on uh probably uh ubuntu
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which is a lightweight distro of ubuntu is it just me or does uh giving your
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grandma Linux seem like a bad idea
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based on that giving Linus Linux is already looking like a bad idea uh yes
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we'll talk more about that a little bit later thank you david
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okay we're tired of waiting for the true type fonts to install
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yeah we want to cancel we're done okay it looks like it's not going to prompt
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us to do that again so why don't we poke around in here it's
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totally grand oriented so we've got thunderbird email client is that even
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still updated it is it got discontinued and i think it got picked up again it's
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got a dedicated link to facebook which presumably will open in firefox web
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browser here and that is an old firefox logo yeah
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so there is not a whole heck of a lot to this is there yeah there's libreoffice
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there's firefox and for grandma anyway there is
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no obvious way to add more applications not
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really usually in a user-friendly operating system like
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ubuntu or manjaro or what have you there'll be like an add or remove
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software yeah but in this case i mean i know what it is but
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now let's try file res ready to find and save your files with
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one click i'm going to try this one click approach go i hear the hard drive
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ticking yeah it's you can see that it's it's mounted the drive and
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program files oh it's just finding everything
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now did it actually grab the pictures that you put on
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specifically to test it um
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looks like that's all program files oh here we go here it is
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oh okay what we don't know is how it handles if
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you have more data than will fit on a usb stick
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but that's a little bit beyond the scope of this
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investigation i think so i guess the point we're getting at here is that if
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gran is got has got the wherewithal to
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learn Linux which you know what if all
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she's ever gonna look at is facebook
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and email and kindle and pinterest maybe
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isn't even that hard yeah no probably not but if you're gonna
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put the effort in to learn how to use Linux maybe you should put the effort
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into learning how to create your own bootable Linux usb
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which Anthony has created for us
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complete with high-end graphics
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how long did it take you to create this thing Anthony about an hour about an
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hour okay okay so uh what am i looking at here this is manjaro Linux
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it's a relatively lightweight uh modern Linux distribution based on arch Linux
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got it that's our hard drive so getting into our
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documents and settings and any pictures we left behind is
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basically as simple as just navigating for them yep did you
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pre-configure it with firefox or does that just it comes with firefox out of the box
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great well let's have a look at our youtube experience then since that was the last thing we looked at on extra pc
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again firefox is not going to be hardware accelerated so
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a couple drop frames here and there and uh yeah
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oh wait wait yes oh yeah yeah it's still a hot mess
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what else did we try do we just want like some general responsiveness fire up
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some open office you know yeah fire up some open office i mean it's still it's
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all going to be usb 2. so it's going to be comparable as far as load times go but sure
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so let's create a writer document where do you put what you want to call it oh
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stop here okay sure beautiful did you have to install any
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drivers or anything or no the auto detection is pretty good
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okay cool oh look at this it's got chromium and everything is this all
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pre-installed stuff i didn't i pre-installed chromium you did yeah okay
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uh everything else is pre-installed including steel including steam yep huh
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how about that normally steam's only available in ubuntu in terms of overall
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responsiveness no maybe it isn't actually
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much worse let's just open up our news
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no it's probably about as slow yeah you can only ask so much of a
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pentium d okay why don't we try and why don't we try and do one more thing let's
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play some grand friendly games on steam okay
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that frame rate though yeah well it's running at full hd but it's
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running i realize now that i've never actually
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played pickle what yeah oh peggle rocks it's pachinko
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oh yeah yeah i know
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god of tetris there it is
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yeah extreme fever you're dead okay all right Anthony let's go head to head how
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do we head to head with one mouse uh take turns oh okay
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all right what
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oh that was the tutorial level you've got
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oh no you have to beat it all the time no forget it and we're done
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extra pc your closing thoughts it's not as bad as i thought it would be
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um that file wreck or whatever it was called uh programs far res yeah uh
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actually worked pretty well uh i wasn't expecting it to but it did it pulled off
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all the files that would be considered important to most people aside from the
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fact that it's really old and the it wouldn't install the fonts which would
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have given grant a little bit of trouble yeah i mean it's it's just straight
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ubuntu with some extra fluff on it and it's not too bad but for the price
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now i'm actually going to take up a contrary position here because i think
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the price is really reasonable the extra time it would take them to faff about
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creating a bootable Linux usb 40 to 80
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dollars is perfectly reasonable the one thing i do take issue with here is that
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it's advertised as a resurrector of old
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machines when as we've clearly demonstrated it's not a magic bullet you
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don't go from not being able to play youtube videos and open documents to
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suddenly being able to do that you are still very much limited by the hardware
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that you have and there is going to be a learning
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curve for grand and that's something that i feel like they could be a lot
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more transparent about in their advertising so my issue here is not with
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the product but rather just with the claims the product itself
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i actually don't mind it yeah i thought i would hate it i was i
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was expecting this video to just be crapping all over extra pc but you can i
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think probably see the tone shift as we make our way through it yeah a lot
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