My favorite trick to reviving old computers is trying to find ways to get them to run off of solid state storage. It really makes a huge difference. You will be surprised by how much more tolerable classic computers are when you no longer have to deal with slow storage mediums.
Mind you this doesn’t make them modern levels of fast and you no longer get the satisfaction of hearing the hard drive grinding away when you open a window but thems the tradeoffs…sigh…
Runs on an 10 year old Toshiba mini NB505 Netbook
And if your computer can’t even handle that, there’s always Tiny Core.
My 25 year old PII with 192MB of RAM is surprisingly responsive with TCL.
Oooh, I have an old Vaio PictureBook Id like to eventually revive. Currently it’s running a very old Mandrake from that time (with KDE). Not sure if I can fit something more modern on it.
Looks like it would work. I did have an adapter lying around that let me use a CF card instead of a spinning disk, so that helped.
The biggest hassle was getting the thing to start because boot from USB didn’t really exist back then so I had to burn a CD and the drive on that machine is kind of flaky these days.
Though I will say that it’s not exactly usable. Pretty much any website makes it grind to a halt. But it’s good right up until then.
That machine was quite annoying because it refused to boot off anything other than its internal disk or an external floppy i.e. no USB sticks, despite it having a USB port. Even back then, stuff was mostly coming out on ISOs for CDs and floppies were phased out. Nowadays it’ll probably require a bit of tinkering (and I’ll have to find a floppy).
I have been playing around a bit with both Antix and Damn Small Linux 2 that is based on it. I have been quite impressed.
First, it is really just Debian curated to be light-weight. You have full access to all the Debian repositories.
The 32 bit versions also work great. I booted to a fully working desktop on a 32 bit system and only 84 MB of RAM was being used. On top of that I ran Firefox, LibreOffice, Scribis, GIMP, and I think other things and was still around 900 MB. It would be amazing on ancient hardware.
This was my entry into Linux, and love it so far. My Windows 7 computer has generally been so snappy. Even without an SSD and only 4G in RAM it starts faster than my Windows 11, 32GB, i7 laptop.
