I digged out my dad’s old business laptop from 2006. This Asus rust is almost as old as me. But it booted up a horribly slow Windows 7 Home Premium that is totally unusable. Takes 30-40 minutes to open Chrome. Here are the specs: 40 gb old hard drive that is suprisingly healthy (96℅ according to HDDsentinel, more than 1000 days left) 1.73 ghz Intel Celeron M single core cpu that wasn’t exactly the fastest even in 2006 1.25 gb of terribly slow RAM American Megatrends BIOS from 2006 I know Linux can’t do miracles, but are there any still supported distro i could install that would actually run better than this shitty windows stuff?
I found puppy slitaz antix tahrpup ArchBang Slax Delicate Damn Small Linux Absolute FunOS LegacyOS exe gnu/linux Do you know others? Or from these which you recommend if my goal is to create a relatively useable, faster computer, preferably while it doesn’t look that awful (the desktop or wm). So usability>speed>looks But all these are very important, just in this order. Also recommend a desktop enviroment or a window manager that runs well, but doesn’t look that awful and can be installed on these distros
Given the age of the thing, your battery is probably going to be pretty much hosed at this point, so you’re probably going to be stuck using it plugged in, basically as a desktop.
Well, at 1.25GB of memory, I probably wouldn’t be running a desktop environment at all if possible; just a window manager. If you’re willing to use Xorg, which is on its way out in favor of Wayland, I’d probably use that and just a window manager on top of it. Maybe fluxbox as that window manager, which is pretty lightweight. twm might be even lighter, though you may or may not like that.
I think that the memory is going to be pretty tight for some important modern desktop graphical apps, like a web browser, as you’ve noticed. I mean, you can run it, as long as you’re willing to go into swap, but it’s going to degrade performance more.
I’d probably make a reasonable server for a lot of uses, if you don’t care about running graphical apps.
Not what you asked, but broader-perspective take:
I don’t know what your budget is, but I’ve thrown out a number of computers that are a lot more powerful than that. Given that the thing’s battery isn’t gonna be in great shape and it sounds like it’s going to be limited to desktop-like use, if you want a desktop machine, and unless you specifically want a challenge, if you at all can, I’d probably try to get a used desktop that has at least considerably more memory. The work that you’re going to put into your dad’s old laptop and the tradeoffs that you’d need to make are ones that I wouldn’t consider worthwhile for the savings, myself.
hits Craigslist
Like, this probably isn’t near you, but as an example, here’s some guy selling, among other things, a used desktop with 16GB of RAM for $30:
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/sys/d/san-jose-dell-office-computers/7813689611.html
That’s over an order of magnitude more memory and is going to be far more practical as a desktop. Doesn’t have a monitor, have to rustle one of those up, but with something like that, you’re going to wind up with a machine that is going to be a lot more usable as a desktop machine.
my goal is not a daily driver with this, but only something nostalgic and the idea to run a computer until it really dies and becomes totally unusable (like core components get damaged) anything craigslist is out of the picture, i’m european. I heard about fluxbox, but there are openbox and jwm, icewm, i3 too. Are those any good?
Aight, as long as you’re moderating your expectations and interested in it from that aspect. Just don’t want you to spend a lot of time on it and to be disappointed – like, no matter what the OS does, some modern graphical applications are going to have heavy RAM usage relative to what’s in that machine.
Sure, but I can’t believe that the global market for used computers is wildly different. If it were, someone would just get into the business of bulk-moving them across international lines, arbitraging them. I’m sure that Europe has analogous services.
kagis
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/15tqw98/what_is_your_countrys_equivalent_of_craigslist/
There are some there.
I mean, it’s all relative. There are certainly people who like them enough to use them.
Fluxbox (and blackbox, and openbox) looked kind of similar the last time I was comparing them, which was a long time ago. They look and work more like a conventional Windows windowing environment. They’re older and fairly lightweight.
I’ve used i3 myself for some time (and use sway now, which is an i3-alike for Wayland), so I don’t have any criticisms of it, but it may or may not be what you want, if you’re not familiar with a tiling windowing environment. It probably wouldn’t be the first thing I’d recommend to someone getting their feet wet with Linux off Windows, as it’s one more thing to become familiar with, and you’re probably going to be doing a fair bit of that already.
I don’t recall using jwm, and the last time I used icewm was so long ago that I can’t recall anything about it.