As I was donating a couple placemats to Hospice Boutique, an old lady in line in front of me was trying to donate a monitor and some other computer stuff. They wouldn't take it because they don't take computer stuff, so I was like, "I could use that monitor to go with an old computer I'm planning to give away soon". She agreed but didn't know much about computers, and I think because she didn't know what thing I was talking about when I said "monitor", she just started giving me stuff in case the things she was giving me was the monitor I was referring to. So I got an old monitor, an old laptop, and an old tablet.

The tablet ended up not turning on, and the laptop is super old with Windows XP. However, unlike newer laptops, it has a working DVD drive. I installed Puppy Linux on it, a distribution intended for extremely old hardware, which wasn't too difficult and works great even on hardware that seems to be about 20 years old! And it played DVDs right away without needing to install any new software. So now I have a portable DVD player.

The biggest challenge was that when I first tried installing Linux using the bootable USB key I had of a more mainstream distribution, it just showed a black screen. I thought it might have meant the laptop was dead until I realized that the USB key is for 64-bit computers, and this laptop is so old that it's 32-bit.

So the moral of the story is: if you have a super old computer that you think is worthless, it can still be used. Just install Puppy Linux!