New Life with T30

[rjundi]

My old T30 was pretty useless with modern broswers, 768MB ram and WinXp

Before getting ready to get rid of notebook I downloaded Xubuntu which is lighterweight ubuntu. I tried ubuntu first and it barely ran on my notebook.

With Firefox 13, pdf viewer, even flash, printer working its pleasant to use that old T30.

Worth the 10 min download and self install of xubuntu. My last experience with Linux desktop 10 years ago was not pleasant.

My plan is actually to use this notebook to develop with as my server as needed since it has a 160GB drive.

 

[simple_gifts]

Many people buy new computers because of Windows. As it gets older, it runs slower and people think they need a new computer; truth is, they need a new OS.

A friend of mine is currently using a Latitude D620 with Ubuntu and it quite the snappy machine with 2Gb. I think I purchased it used for < $150.

 

[Brons2]

The Unity interface on the regular Ubuntu is slow on older machines. If you run the gnome-session-fallback or whatever command it is to run Gnome rather than Unity on regular Ubuntu, it runs a lot better on older machines. I have it running on an IBM R52 and Core-single 1.7 and it works pretty good.

On a side note, I don't find that Xubuntu is materially faster than regular Ubuntu. It will still bog down if you open too many Firefox windows, or have too much Flash running.

The real problem for using older machines today IMO is that Web browsers are bloatware in general. That's usually the limiting factor with having an older machine to use with any OS in my experience.

I'm currently running (typing on) an older laptop with a Core2Duo T5250 1.5Ghz and 4GB of RAM. Which works fine for using a modern OS. The problem is the integrated graphics, it's really starting to struggle with the newer versions of Flash. Playing any sort of video causes the CPU to go into the 90-100% range. YouTube videos skip and stutter at times, and I can't make it work with Netflix as the voices get out of time with the video.

The laptop is dual booted with Win7 and Ubuntu, and I have the same problems with both. I suppose it shows the value of having discrete graphics on your laptop, if you're planning to keep it for a long time. If it was a desktop, I'd just throw in a cheap DX11 compatible video card and soldier on.

 

[antiqueshell]

Try Linux Puppy.

 

[uc50ic4more]

The Gnome "Fallback" interface (install "gnome-fallback-session" or something to that effect in Ubuntu's Software Center) will run much, much faster and smoother on older systems. Even Unity's 2D interface is resource-heavy and slow; so I suggest that anyone who is either using an older system AND/ OR prefers a standard desktop experience (with a menu, window lists, etc.) use the fallback

All of the Ubuntu flavours are heavier Linux distributions. Using Puppy or some other distribution might be a little thin on features and common applications. Luckily, there are a few hundred commonly-available and well-supported distributions out there for folks to try!