I wanted a fun laptop so I switch my EDC to a Dell Latitude E5440

Yesterday I was complaining on Mastodon that the laptop I was using was boring. I switched from it back to an ancient Dell Latitude E5440 and I’ve been having fun with it.

I had been using a Dell Latitude 7490 I acquired it from a friend and it is a fine machine. It is just boring. It is boring like a tech bro podcast: Sterile, cookie cutter, and bland. If I wasn’t looking for something fun to do and needed a reliable laptop, the 7490 would be great. Specs are good, screen looks nice, and in fantastic condition.

But, right now I’m looking for some fun. Something I can do to distract me from the horrors of reality for an hour or two a day while I play with some computers. I don’t have any money, so buying something isn’t an option. I mean, I just wrote about being poor.

So, I went to look through my old laptop pile for something fun to work on. Once again, I was pulled back to the E5440.

I love this laptop.

The CPU is a i7-4600 and has 16GB of RAM. Nothing to write home about in 2025. It does have a GPU, but it is a Nvidia 710M and can only use the legacy 39x series driver. Basically Nouveau with no Vulkan support.

What I love about it is the ability to be creative with storage. It has a mSATA port that you can boot from, along with an internal 2.5" HDD slot. The best part is the DVD drive can be removed and replaced with another 2.5" HDD slot. This means I can have 3 internal storage drives and can load it up with all kinds of data for fun offline projects.

For the storage I did my layout like this:

• / on the mSATA drive. I am using a 64GB drive.
• /home on an external 1TB NVMe drive.
• A 1TB 2.5" spinning disk in the primary HDD slot.
• A 500GB 2.5" slim SSHD drive in the secondary HDD slot.

I always wanted to try having /home on an external drive to see how it performs. I can report it works great and has me thinking about future projects with USB-C flash drives like this. I also wanted to have /home on a separate drive since the mSATA is so small and I wanted to leave the 2.5" slots available for more storage.

The 1TB was pulled out of a 2014 Mac Mini I have no plans on ever using and then I had the 500GB SSHD laying around from a previous laptop. Both of the spinning disks I combined into a mergerfs pool to give 1.27TB of functional storage. In this pool I have added my Kiwix library, full apt clone as the data store for aptly, about 10 different Linux ISOs for running VMs, and my archives for flatpaks and Docker images. This is essentially offline internet-in-a-box data and can do all kinds of fun stuff without ever connecting online.

For the OS I have gone with MX Linux. I like its polish on top of Debian and I’ve had a ton of luck doing weird disk layouts with it.

Since my work season is winding down I’ve had a lot of free time in-between stops on my routes, so I’ve wanted to have more entertainment with me. On /home I’ve added several Humble and GOG games I’ve bought over the years that have no DRM and work completely offline. I’m also adding movies, tv shows, and other video content to watch while I’m just hanging out in the truck.

The goal is to be able to chill in the truck for up to 3 hours with a portable homelab and media machine.

In addition to the drive options, I also have a slice battery that fits into the dock serial port on the bottom of the laptop. This gives another 97Wh of juice in addition to the internal battery.

I also have a E-Port Plus II ProX2 docking station so I can turn this laptop into a great desk machine.

It is all these options that make it so fun to play with. Yes, the laptop is heavy. Yes, it is old. No, the GPU doesn’t support Vulkan. But, it is fun. I can do all kinds of wack-ass builds for no reason other than being fun.

I still have some things to work on with it. It has a fingerprint sensor and I’d love to see if I can get that working in MX Linux. I want to move my desk around so I can use it as my primary with the docking station. Then I can carry for my EDC and dock at my desk for the full one machine life.

I asked folks on Mastodon what computer they’ve used that they had fun using. I know there’s a folks who only read this blog and I’d love to hear your answer. What computer have you had or currently have that you have fun using? Why is it fun? What kinds of fun things have you done?

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