So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she “upgraded” to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it’s so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
If you have a little cash to spare, I’d recommend upgrading this thing a little bit.
A 480GB SATA 2.5" SSD costs around €22.
8GB of DDR3 can be had for ~€10.
So with maybe €35 of investment (and probably much less if you buy used stuff from your local flea market app) you could make the laptop much faster and much more usable.
If you don’t actually need ~500GB of storage, a 240GB SSD can be had for ~€12.
I ordered the parts now, a 8gb ram stick (gddr3) and a 520gb ssd for all in all 34€. The parts should arrive in about 2 weeks. Thank you!
The SSD upgrade is almost critical, and when you install the OS, be sure to include a swap partition (2GB is enough) that functions as a system buffer/parallel & virtual RAM. A bigger RAM chip can’t hurt either. This is exactly what I’ve done for a very similar machine mentioned in another post of this thread.
When using an SSD, install the OS with ZRAM instead of swap. This will increase the SSD’s life.
The SSD upgrade is almost critical, and when you install the OS, be sure to include a swap partition (2GB is enough) that functions as a system buffer/parallel & virtual RAM. A bigger RAM chip can’t hurt either. This is exactly what I’ve done for a very similar machine mentioned in another post of this thread.
Lububtu is another lightweight distro for old devices. I’ve used it before on very old devices and it’s great!
Lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu…I’ve gone from Lu to Xu, but I think I’ll end up with ku because PipeWire and wayland and flatpak (I get the impression that they’re the way forward for the next while…). They’ll make pretty much anything work better than whatever windows version retired them.
Thats the system overwatch:
Try something like Linux Mint with the Xfce edition. Might be able to lower the RAM a bit more.
Even if they run only a window manager 2gb of RAM is just not enough for web nowadays.
Recently resurrected a 10-ish year old Lenovo Chromebook-like with an atom CPU and 4gb RAM, running nothing but qtile as a DE and it’s struggling with more than 5 tabs open.
Upgrade the RAM to at least 4gb, preferably 8 and the HDD to SSD.
Also, don’t bother with “lightweight” browsers, in my experience Firefox simply runs much faster.
Can confirm: after the 6th tab while shopping for upgrades everything went to slow motion.
Those Atom processors don’t have the power to be much more than an in-car navigation system with MP3 playback. Forget actual web surfing. You’re actually better off with a RasPi imho.
