For £5, I bought a 2006 Advent 7113 off Vinted. It has 1GB of RAM. I like messing around with old hardware and this is the oldest laptop I've ever bought. It was big, chunky and had two ethernet ports, a DVD player and a physical network on/off switch. It had a port for those old mouse/keyboards (apparently called a PS/2 port) that I thought only existed on PCs. But it taught me about encryption and the value of preventing e-waste.

I've repaired and upgraded my fair share of hardware before; the ThinkPad X220, old netbooks and Xbox 360s. I'm no pro but I've enjoyed tinkering with old hardware, primarily because it's so cheap.

I wasn't even expecting the laptop to be functional but with my PC cable sitting around with the voltage matching up, I booted it up and was surprised to see it worked. Right away it launched into Windows Vista, the keyboard didn't work but I wasn't even expecting it to boot. I see users on the home page, not knowing the passwords and expecting the hard drive to be extremely old, I take this thing open. My god, was this thing ridiculously complex.

Maybe the internal hardware layout wasn't as agreed upon in the early 2000s but this was a mess to take open; layers upon layers of screws, screws and more screws; oxidised screws, stripped ones, ones that I took about 10 off of and didn't remove anything, I started to label them because I was losing track of what went where because they were so different. It turns out, Advent's choices for their internal hardware were a result of cost cutting; cheap manufacturing doesn't always go well with repairability and access to specific internal components, the whole philosophy with Advent was getting it off the shelf and in a living room with little thought into much else.

This was obvious, this thing was stubborn, I even needed a set of pliers to remove something called a hex screw just to get to the HDD. When I did run a SMART scan on the HDD, as expected it was in poor condition, I used AI to summarise the results so I genuinely don't know more than this other than; by the nature of its age, it was worth replacing, so I did.

I repasted the thermal paste on the laptop since it had definitely cracked in the two decades it had been lying around, one section of the heat sink had a thermal pad which I don't think I've ever seen before and I took the CMOS battery out to prevent any leaking on such an old battery, if it does leak, it could destroy the whole board. I don't have CMOS batteries lying around so I had to live without one, it just means the system date can't sync which means I can't access the internet which means I have to manually change the date every time I want.

I'm surprised I didn't break it to be honest, the fan and heat sink were connected, I couldn't get any further down and I'd removed all the screws I possibly could.

I connected the hard drive to a laptop, and to my surprise, Windows Vista has zero encryption; all the user files that were password protected are now just completely out there. Out of curiosity, I did look on the hard drive and oh man, the heaps of personal data: National Insurance numbers, family photos and videos, email addresses, addresses, full names, CVs, phone numbers, all dated but still risky to have lying around.

To my surprise, encryption wasn't a standard in the early 2000s; I looked into it and one of the main reasons was performance, full disk encryption like we take for granted now meant a noticeable performance hit. It's only very recently that encryption became a standard default across Windows, Apple and Linux.

I wiped the data and threw away the drive, adding an unnecessary 1TB HDD, because it was the only one I had lying around.

Next, the installation; antiX is perfect for old machines, they have drive encryption, network security (that Vista didn't support anymore) and essentially is one of very few options for 32-bit machines like this one.

My god, was it a battle installing this. This is where my knowledge cuts off and I'm left in the dark; I know that this machine being old is the main cause, I had the DVD drive ISO boot as a backup option but I didn't want to go out of my way to buy blank DVDs if I didn't need to. The specific format and size of the USB as well as the specific way it was booted were issues that I didn't know how to resolve, to be honest, I'm not interested in learning driver, Linux or OS setups at the moment.

I relied on Fable 5, the most intelligent model Anthropic has right now and is leaving soon, I wanted to get some last use out of it and what followed was a complex back and forth regarding setting up the OS on this machine. Maybe I should've left it but no, I'm getting my £5 worth and clearly, I have enough time on my hands...

What followed was the longest technical back and forth ever, the pattern was: find an issue, send it to Fable, receive a response, fix that issue but make another, for over an hour.

The short version to save another 20 paragraphs is this; the laptop is old enough that booting from USB isn't really a thing it was designed to do. Every normal method failed: Ventoy, manual booting, a wild goose chase, I changed USB three times, I used a checksum to confirm no corruption in the OS. What finally worked was using the bootloader from a previously installed Linux Mint and somehow copied antiX onto there? I seriously have no idea beyond this, it was a miracle when it finally installed.

Not a fun way to spend the evening, I only got this done thanks to Fable 5; the more information I gave it, the closer it got, and eventually it was done. My reward: a pile of crap. No, for real though; it makes a great offline text machine, I also hate e-waste, it's also cool to have something so old, replacements for specific parts still exist on eBay but not for the cheapest since this thing is very niche.

Here it is, feast your eyes

It can run text files, has access to likely some Linux applications, can probably run DVDs but I have none lying around anymore, it can send emails and can barely open one tab of Firefox.

There you have it; what can a £5 laptop buy you? A writing machine, emails and a very very slow browser, honestly not bad at all.

Welcome. The purpose of this website is to record my learning in networking, python and eventually, cybersecurity. For the next year or so (until I get my CCNA) I'll be primarily focusing on networking. I'm pretty new to networking, I studied a bit of the CCNA before and had attempts to record what I learned but it quickly became boring to me because I ended up writing everything I learned and I don't want that.

What I do want is to record primarily labs and things that I fully understand and learned; projects I made and things that are interesting to me, I want all my progress for this to be recorded here and hopefully I can help people with similar projects.