Laptop contention

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 1:55 pm

I happen to have my mother's laptop at my place, and I'll likely have it around for a couple months before I see her again. Until then, I've sort of made it my goal to improve it. I forget where she got it, but it's an Everex Stepnote with a C7-M 1500MHz processor and 383MB memory. It came with Windows Vista.

It takes 2 minutes to load a single word document, assuming I don't do anything else after I turn the thing on, and will spaz out and not find the document if I am running concurrently. What can I do to make the thing actually run smoothly? I slightly suspect that Vista is too much for the hardware, but I don't know how or where to get something like Windows 2000 onto the laptop.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 2:02 pm

Windows 7 is supposed to lighter than Vista. Alternatively you might want to try a Linux distro. Ubuntu has a live CD you can try before installing anything. Puppy Linux is extremely lightweight and reportedly runs well on 486 machines.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 4:39 pm

Vista is way too much for that hardware -- 338 MB of RAM is the major problem there, as with Vista you should have around two gigabytes.

Windows 2000 may be okay, but for that hardware I'd really recommend a user-friendly version of Linux (like Ubuntu).

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 6:23 pm

Yeah, XP would be a better choice than Vista, there. You might try OSX, too, I believe the everex computers are mostly compatible.

-Crissa

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 3:12 am

What moron decided to put Vista on a machine with less than half the required memory ?

Change the OS.

Puppy Linux has been mostly awesome for me on my extra cheapo lappy.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 7:37 am

XP or Linux for sure. Maybe 7, I'll be testing out a netbook with 7 on it in early September. That'll be interesting.

Even with XP I'd want 512MB of RAM, Linux can probably handle less but I've never personally seen Linux on such a small system. Depends on whether your mum can handle Linux.

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 11:49 am

Yeah, what they said. Having Vista on that machine is just a godawful idea. Assuming this computer is going back to your mother, you'll probably want to stick with Windows rather than going for something Linux, so go track down Windows XP. Alternatively, computers are relatively cheap these days, and if you wanted to get a new one with improved specs, you could easily find something for under 500 bucks.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 3:05 pm

That's a really low-powered computer in pretty much all meanings of the word. You'll want to make everything as light-weight as possible, for example don't use firefox unless you have to (i.e. Linux). Chrome and IE are probably better choices for windows.

You might want to look at Ubuntu netbook remix, which I imagine is specialized for low-powered computers (although it also has some interface tweaks that won't be as useful). The problem with linux is that a lot of the basic programs are really overweight (e.g. Open Office), and the distributions designed to work on low-resource computers often forgo such niceties as graphical user interfaces.

Buying some more ram will probably cost $40 at most, so that's a worthwhile option as well. Look at Newegg.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 5:29 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:The problem with linux is that a lot of the basic programs are really overweight (e.g. Open Office), and the distributions designed to work on low-resource computers often forgo such niceties as graphical user interfaces.

Not true in my experience. Even Ubuntu compares favorably with Windows. If you want a fast graphical environment though, PuppyLinux seems like the distribution of choice. If it ran Wine I would probably still use it. Having all of your programs in memory is amazing. Everything starts up instantly, everything is responsive. It is just nice to work with.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 5:46 pm

but I've never personally seen Linux on such a small system. Depends on whether your mum can handle Linux.

My cheaptop has a blazing 633 Mhz on it's P3 and a masssive 128 MB of RAM, and the Puppy GUI is windowslike enough that Darcy has had almost no problems performing basic tasks on it.

The issues I have had with it so far:

Getting wireless set up with my existing network card invloved a workaround that didn't work around - solved by buying a supported card
Does not implement FMT command. But in fairness, nothing on my Windows machine could mass-add hard line breaks either - the answer here was "learn Perl"
The De-archiver for opening RAR files in Puppy 4.0 does not work. You can download an app to fix this - of course it is compressed as a RAR.....hopefully you also have a machine running something else here

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 7:29 pm

Murtak wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:The problem with linux is that a lot of the basic programs are really overweight (e.g. Open Office), and the distributions designed to work on low-resource computers often forgo such niceties as graphical user interfaces.
Not true in my experience. Even Ubuntu compares favorably with Windows. If you want a fast graphical environment though, PuppyLinux seems like the distribution of choice. If it ran Wine I would probably still use it. Having all of your programs in memory is amazing. Everything starts up instantly, everything is responsive. It is just nice to work with.

Fair enough. On my computer, OO.Org runs more sluggishly in Ubuntu than MS Office runs in XP (fucking secret activeX controls; OO runs even more slowly on Windows), and Foobar2000 on WINE is slower than Foobar2000 in XP. Firefox in Ubuntu has about 5 times the startup time as Chrome in XP, but to be fair Firefox in XP takes even longer (this is all without preloaded launchers). Some of this could be because Windows is on an earlier partition.

I haven't use Puppy, so maybe it's way faster. And maybe Ubuntu just doesn't run well on my laptop for strange hardware reasons.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:03 am

Ubuntu is a damn slow Linux. It is great in that it supports almost anything, usually straight out of the box, but itÄs not fast. Puppy Linux on the other hand fits on a 50 MB mini CD and can if I recall correctly, fit every included program into 128 MB of RAM and only ever write to disk when you shut it down. Obviously that is going to be damn fast. As for startup time, many windows apps cheat by preloading when you boot the OS, so they basically add to your boot time to lower the app start time. You can disable it of course, but I still hate it. Both MS Office and OpenOffice do it by default (or used to). No clue about Chrome. And Firefox is turning into a bloated resource hog again.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:19 am

Sometimes knowing something may be slow, but at least a linux variant will be more reliable at those slow speeds. Knowing it'll finish what it's doing and get to the next step at a standard pace, even if slow, if better than not knowing ala Windows...

-Crissa

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:32 am

Hmm... Go old school.

98 se 2.

or is ther se 3?

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:47 am

Yeah XP or a linux variant. Anything that has a GUI will work fine - check what the usage if, OO is to much hassle to remotely support if they regularly send documents to other people.

Also that machine is a peice of shit. 383 MB Ram? What the fuck?

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 6:16 am

It says 383MB RAM on the loading screen. A friend suggested it likely has 512MB, but it's absorbing the difference to run the vid card or something.

Knowing my mother and her proficiency with computers, as well as how she gets stubbornly nonsensical at times, I suspect XP would be a better choice than Linux. Now the question is, obtaining installation CDs for the job...

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 7:27 am

CatharzGodfoot wrote:The problem with linux is that a lot of the basic programs are really overweight (e.g. Open Office), and the distributions designed to work on low-resource computers often forgo such niceties as graphical user interfaces.

This wasn't always true (remember when Firefox, called Phoenix back then, was supposed to be a project that cut out the bloat of the larger Mozilla? What happened to that?). What are today's actual lightweight replacements for these programs like Firefox and OpenOffice?

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 9:01 am

Abiword and about five thousand browsers. The reason to use firefox nowadays isn't less bloat, it is fast javascript (if you are using 3.5 or higher) and add-ons. By the way, a large part of firefox's slowness stems from the gazillions of file accesses it does. So I guess the standalone executable which does not even access the disc should run way faster.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:07 pm

Well, it was killed by the attempt to make it actually display the feature-creep laden web pages.

-Crissa

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Aug 07, 2009 10:15 pm

Murtak wrote:By the way, a large part of firefox's slowness stems from the gazillions of file accesses it does. So I guess the standalone executable which does not even access the disc should run way faster.

Well, there's also the issue where it has a rather large memory footprint.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 7:43 am

Update, Windows 7 runs just fine on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom netbook with 2GB of RAM. I was rather pleased, Vista would've been crap on a much more powerful machine.