Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I'd love some insight from people around.
Tiny Core
This is the answer. Tiny Core is absolute best for old hardware as it gets running upto speed quickly takes very little resources and you can see what kind of resources it consumes and can add things to it to make it useful.
Doesn't Tiny Core load into RAM? With 512 MB that could be a problem. There are many versions of Puppy Linux. I think they load into RAM also. I would try MX Linux and see if that worked. Expanding the amount of RAM would be helpful, but it is not worth spending money on that machine. I bought a functioning Fujitsu laptop with a 6th gen Core i5 Processor and 8 GB RAM for $80 on Ebay. Computers with a 7th gen Intel Core Processor or older won't officially run Windows 11 so they are selling for cheap these days, if you shop around.
Tiny Core can loadit self into RAM, but it doesn't have to, you can do a normal install as well. Also even if you want to run it from RAM, it only takes 46MB in RAM not ideal but manageable with 512MB. Also you can even downgrade if you are not UI dependent, you can install the core (non-tiny version) and only needs 26MB RAM.
Also consider Windows XP requires 200 MB of RAM to function, before we run any apps at all, so Tiny taking 46 MB to run leaves a huge headroom.
Antix probably
FreeBSD
Void Linux?
Debian GNU/Hurd 🤤
TinyCore (loads itself into RAM), Puppy, Proteus and Zolin Lite will all be happy with 512 MiB.
Edit: also antiX, QOS, Slax and DSL.
Archbang, Slitaz, Sparky and MX may not support x86, double-check.
Also gentoo has a full binary-only version now.
Edit2:
Interesting that Zorin says their regular flavors are now efficient enough that they'll run just fine on older hardware, so there's no need to continue Zorin Lite:
It’s now possible to run the non-Lite editions of Zorin OS on computers with as little as 2 GB of RAM and on machines as old as 15 years, with higher performance than the Lite edition in some tasks.
Emphasis mine. Wow, only 2 GiB...
Emphasis mine. Wow, only 2 GiB...
That's not as low as you'd think, to be fair. I've tried to run Kubuntu on a 10 year old laptop with 2 GiB RAM and it worked, if only a little laggy. That being said, it crashes after half an hour without swap. But with swap, it is legitimately daily drivable (as long as you don't run heavy apps, of course).
I'd imagine a distro that's designed to be even more lightweight would be able to handle that.
I would usually recommend Linux Mint, but damn that thing belongs in a museum!
Hell, why not put an antique OS like Windows XP for that antique piece of beauty?
It's running windows XP but it's currently unable to use any browsers as the user wants to use it for
I'm afraid you're really shit outta luck as even Firefox is killing 32-bit.
You could prolly find someone who's kept some old versions of 32-bit FF, but using them on -today's- network with old-time security? Whoof. As for the OS, some older XFCE's WILL work OK w 500MB, but you'll be waiting on disk-swap a lot, and SSD options will be limited.
but using them on -today's- network with old-time security?
This has always been the main issue with older software, hasn't it?
512MB of ram? you could probably just run a command line terminal and call it a day. good luck, soldier. bringing that old warhorse back to life is a noble quest.
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