What operating system for an old laptop?

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barlowc

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I have an old Micron TransPort ZX laptop that is in excellent condition. It has a Pentium II 400 MHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM. (I said it was old.) I was hoping to resurrect it and put something simple on it so that my Mother-In-Law could use it to surf the web and do e-mail.

Any thoughts on what operating system might run with reasonable speed? I think Windows XP will be too heavy for it. I still have disks for Windows 2000, Windows NT4, and heaven forbid Windows 9x. The problem with all of those is that I'm not sure I could even get a recent version of Firefox (e.g. 3.6) to run on them.

Any thoughts as to whether or not the machine has enough to run Ubuntu? Or is there some other lightweight operating system that would likely support the hardware and run a browser?

I've thought about just spending a few hundred dollars and getting her a newer laptop, but the last time I did that it just sat on a desk in her condo and collected dust.
 
Originally Posted By: David S.
I vote for Linux. There are several "brands" and a couple are designed to install and run on systems with very limited resources.


+1 - I ran Linux on an old HP laptop and it behaved quite well when XP felt much too heavy.
 
Mint and be done with it, particularly if its for grandma and she's just going to be surfing and emailing.

Though word of warning, battery life isn't going to be all that great with Mint (I've had direct experience with it vs XP on an old Inspiron 6000 and even after tweaking everything and running the intel utility that tracks events that bring the proc back out of deeper sleep states it still wasn't comparable).

That being said, on such an old rig, I'm sure battery life is pretty much nonexistent at this point so...
 
I like ubuntu too but I'd go with Win2k. I had an older laptop with wierdo graphics chipset that could only do 640x480 in the middle of the screen.

We run win2k on some dreadful 1999 era Inspirons at work and they chug along.
 
Ubuntu has gotten much heavier in recent years, requiring more and more power/graphics processing ability. The lastest version with unity will no longer run correctly without tweaking on my 2002 Hp Pavilion zt3000 which has 1.2gb of ram, 1.5ghz centrino processor and a radeon mobility 9200.

Puppy linux would be a great solution, very very lightweight and can run on literally any computer 1995+ Takes up next to no harddrive space and can be run from even very small flash drives.
 
Puppy Linux is the OS you want. Ubuntu, Mint, and the rest will run slow for a variety of reasons on that box. Those are full-on desktop releases for more modern machines. Puppy has very good support from a very helpful community (DSL, mentioned above, is long dead). It is completely full featured, though without frills. I used it as my desktop for quite some time and it's still on my old eeepc. What's really surprising is the hardware support it has.

http://puppylinux.org/main/Download Latest Release.htm
 
Windows XP. In my experience, Linux versions lack the drivers for old (and some new) laptops. XP does not seem to have that issue.
 
Originally Posted By: barlowc
I have an old Micron TransPort ZX laptop that is in excellent condition. It has a Pentium II 400 MHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM. (I said it was old.) I was hoping to resurrect it and put something simple on it so that my Mother-In-Law could use it to surf the web and do e-mail.

Any thoughts on what operating system might run with reasonable speed?

Or is there some other lightweight operating system that would likely support the hardware and run a browser?



+1 on Puppy Linux but you might need version 5.1 or older. Download the latest, burn to CD and see if it boots correctly.

Once it boots you then download and install the browser(s) of choice.

If all works you can then install to the hard drive.

That lappy can max memory at 512 MB using two sockets of PC 100 SDRAM - I'll see if I have any in my parts bin and if so I'll send you a PM on this forum.

Regards,
GEWB
 
XP and 2k are no longer supported or updated, and haven't been for years. I still have XP as my desktop PC OS, but that's only because I don't use it anymore and can't be bothered to update it.

"Not supported" FTR does not mean the OS won't run, just that the "fun" begins when you install software and start getting the odd "OS not supported" message on some apps and have to cancel the install. Its not an every app deal, but over the past couple years it was something I saw more often than I cared to. Now it collects dust until I eventually get around to updating it to Win 7.

JMO.

-Spyder
 
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True, my main machine as I'm typing on right now is a windows 2000 one that is about 8 years old. Sure there are newer software that doesn't support it, like Picasa3 and Office 2003, but there's usually enough alternative that I can get by with, like Picasa2 and Open Office.
 
barlowc,
Windows XP is your choice, but since it's not on sale, I commend to look at Linux systems, such as Utuntu.
 
Thanks for all the input!

XP is too heavy. That's what was running on it and it was painfully slow.

I tried Puppy Linux with Chromium as the browser. It's not bad and might suffice.

I may give Windows 2000 with Firefox a try and see how it compares.
 
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