Have you cleaned it recently?
Old PC and especially laptop can gather dust inside that prevent heat from escaping. The result of that the component are overheating and the fan are running non stop.
Get a can of compressed air, open the laptop and blow ask the dust.
You could probably take it out of the case and rig up some external cooling fans powered via USB or so.
Additional RAM and a STAT SSD would be probably an easy and cheap upgrade as well.
Yeah right now it's working OK, even for internet, so I'm trying to see if I can survive as is. Otherwise I'll replace as the need arises. I might consider pulling out the cooling solution and putting fresh thermal paste, and oiling up the fans.
I’m incredibly biased but you should try putting NixOS on it. With NixOS, you could create a configuration that you’d only have to reason about once then it is set for life. NixOS’s style of config does a lot of great things for reliability too.
I too am incredibly biased ;). I'm a dyed in the wool Debian nut, so I'm basically going to replicate my main setup. The hardest thing is sshing into my home directory of my main PC and moving my configs over. Annoyingly, it seems the computer is too old for Wayland, so Sway won't work. I think I'm happy with Mate.
Computing to support life on Earth
Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.
Definition and purpose of permacomputing: http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html
XMPP chat: https://movim.slrpnk.net/chat/lowtech%40chat.disroot.org/room
Sister community over at lemmy.sdf.org: !permacomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
There's also a wiki: https://permacomputing.net/
Website: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html