What operating system for an old laptop?

[Spyder7]

Originally Posted By: barlowc
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.


2k is a little lighter than XP, but not like the difference in say XP and Vista. XP's out of the box install contains the bloat, but once its stripped and tuned the difference between them is pretty marginal.

Choosing between them I would go the XP route, then disable themes, visual effects, and turn off the many unneeded services it runs by default but which aren't needed. There are several good guides that have been written on how best to do this.

Edit: I have run XP in the past on hardware comparable to what you are running, and it was perky enough with a lite browser, once the process of stripping XP down and tuning the OS was finished.

-Spyder

 

[OVERKILL]

XP should be fine if you can double-up the RAM that's in it.

 

[Spyder7]

Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
XP should be fine if you can double-up the RAM that's in it.


With laptop RAM, and particularly the obsolete stuff his will be using, I wouldn't be surprised if it wound up being cheaper to replace the notebook!

One of those weird idiosyncrasies of computer components, and RAM especially: prices overall keep coming down, except for stuff that is outdated, where its relative price is usually out to lunch.

-Spyder

 

[GEWB]

Puppy Linux News

Barry Kauler, the father of Puppy Linux, has just announced today, May 25th, the immediate availability for download of the Puppy Linux 5.1.2 Wary operating system, an edition of Puppy Linux intended for antique machines.

The new Puppy Linux Wary 5.1.2 distribution focuses on supporting older hardware components. It also brings lots of improvements and bug fixes over previous releases.

"I was thinking of this release as a bugfix release of 5.1.1, but when I started to tally the changes, I realised that there are a lot and probably I should have bumped the version to 5.2!" - said Barry Kauler in the official release announcement.

Based on the latest version of Puppy Linux 5 (Woof), the new Wary release has better hardware detection, a experimental non-root account called 'fido', and new helpful system-level GUIs.

You can download Puppy Linux 5.1.2 from here:

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Op...ary-63884.shtml


Regards,
GEWB

 

[TooManyWheels]

For those recommending Win 2000, what do you use for anti-virus?

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: Spyder7
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
XP should be fine if you can double-up the RAM that's in it.


With laptop RAM, and particularly the obsolete stuff his will be using, I wouldn't be surprised if it wound up being cheaper to replace the notebook!

One of those weird idiosyncrasies of computer components, and RAM especially: prices overall keep coming down, except for stuff that is outdated, where its relative price is usually out to lunch.

-Spyder


I stockpile it, LOL! Should be able to find some cheap/free on Craigslist or Kijiji?

 

[javacontour]

If you must go the Windoze route, I tend to agree.

I replaced my grandmother's computer running Win2k because more and more updated software just wouldn't run on it. I couldn't even install TurboTax so she could do her taxes.

So for about $250, (I think) I got her a referb at MicroCenter with WinXP Pro, more RAM and a modest hard drive.

Since she doesn't d/l music a 40gb or 80gb disk is sufficient for her e-mail and web surfing, plus the annual tax return.

Win2k is a rapidly approaching dead end it seems.

Originally Posted By: Spyder7
Originally Posted By: barlowc
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.


2k is a little lighter than XP, but not like the difference in say XP and Vista. XP's out of the box install contains the bloat, but once its stripped and tuned the difference between them is pretty marginal.

Choosing between them I would go the XP route, then disable themes, visual effects, and turn off the many unneeded services it runs by default but which aren't needed. There are several good guides that have been written on how best to do this.

Edit: I have run XP in the past on hardware comparable to what you are running, and it was perky enough with a lite browser, once the process of stripping XP down and tuning the OS was finished.

-Spyder

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: TooManyWheels
For those recommending Win 2000, what do you use for anti-virus?


Avast is pretty much the only choice left for win2k that's free.

 

[buickman50401]

If the OP does go XP, which a majority of the freeware programs still support, he could also do an nlite install.
http://www.nliteos.com/

You can strip out much of what some people deem bloat in XP for a lean(er) running OS to put on that old hardware.

Also visit Blackviper's pages.
http://www.blackviper.com/2008/05/19/bla...configurations/

He provides a list of services that can be disabled, or set to manual (manual meaning the OS only starts the service when needed) so that you don't have bunch of services that you don't need loading at startup and running in the background eating up precious limited hardware resources. If you pay attention to what you're doing (disabling/setting to manual) hes got guides for Vista and 7 as well which will help speed up system responsiveness.

I've got an old Inspiron 6000 that I nlited XP on as soon as it came fresh out of its Dell shipping box way back in 2005. I also followed BlakViper's service list suggestions for what to disable. Depsite its limits of 2GB Ram, a 1.6GHz Pentium M, and an ATI x300 GPU, the system responsiveness is still impressive even compared to newer hardware and OSes.

 

[occupant]

2000 SP4 is my OS of choice *ONLY* for computers not connected to the internet. My old reliable Dell GX260 with a P4 1.8 and 2GB of memory runs Puppy 4-something but I haven't booted it in a year. I enjoyed Puppy on a VERY old eMachines desktop with a P3-era 600MHz Celeron and 256MB of RAM. That's long gone and now that Puppy is updated to 5...I might just have to clean up the old Dell, wipe off a CRT from the closet...and see what it can do.

I would go with Puppy or the Xubuntu another user recommended. The X-version is very light but it's getting thicker as time goes on. Maybe running an older Ubuntu would be smart. 10.04 is a LTS (long term stable) release and has about a year or two of solid support left.

 

[rjundi]

With a computer that old and slow I would not bother with real-tome virus protection. Heck I made it (2001-2008) years on a T30 with Win XP Pro without incident.

Just make sure everything runs in the web.