Buying an USB2 stick & install an OS on it to revive a laptop

[yokana]

Hello,

I tried to gather a bunch of informations about using an OS on an USB stick and the trend seems to be that read speeds are fine,writes are slow while access times are fasts, it's generally advised to go with USB3 or just forgetting the idea all together.

The thing is that i'm having a VAIO PCG-7G1M with a crappy 1.7ghz processor and 500MB ram in my hands and i'd like to use it somehow, to do a bit of programming. There's no discussion on it being slow but while i've made a fresh install i realized that the USB stick was actually faster on use.

I have a fresh Elementary OS on my laptop which boots fast and does what i want but when loading a gmail tab the hard drive keeps spinning and slowing down the computer so much that i have to kill the tab.

But when loading the Elementary OS Live from the USB stick gmail loads just fine, it is night and day. I'm not sure where the filesystem is made (hdd vs usb) but after a few tests the usb is way more usable, it would make sense if that was thanks to the fast access time but i'm not expert, here a little benchmark i made with the gnome-disk-utility :

average read rate: DD 20.5 | USB 15.7
access time : DD 19.6ms | USB 2.9 ms

So if my premises are good i will be tempted to buy an USB stick quite compact (like the cruzer) with decent size 16GB min, good overall performances and not overpriced otherwise i'd be better just buying another (less) crappy laptop.

Any advice on the model to buy?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

500MB ram

Disk read/write speed will not be your primary problem here, the above is. The reason the computer feels dog slow is because with that little RAM it has to do an awful amount of paging to disk.

Since it seems you're running a Pentium M from what I can gather, your best bet for improved performance would be a couple of (potentially second hand) DIMMs to increase your RAM to 2GB. The Pentium M with DDR2 RAM uses the i915 chipset, which doesn't support more. Coupled with Win7 x86 it should run fairly decent. Another option is a cheap SSD if your system has a SATA port, that will effectively eliminate disk I/O as a problem. Boots a lot faster too.

BTW, I'd think very hard on how much I'd be willing to spend on upgrading such an old laptop, since almost anything modern will be faster, and DDR2 RAM is very expensive.

Oh, and welcome to the forums... 🙂

 

[TheStu]

Disk read/write speed will not be your primary problem here, the above is. The reason the computer feels dog slow is because with that little RAM it has to do an awful amount of paging to disk.

Since it seems you're running a Pentium M from what I can gather, your best bet for improved performance would be a couple of (potentially second hand) DIMMs to increase your RAM to 2GB. The Pentium M with DDR2 RAM uses the i915 chipset, which doesn't support more. Coupled with Win7 x86 it should run fairly decent. Another option is a cheap SSD if your system has a SATA port, that will effectively eliminate disk I/O as a problem. Boots a lot faster too.

BTW, I'd think very hard on how much I'd be willing to spend on upgrading such an old laptop, since almost anything modern will be faster, and DDR2 RAM is very expensive.

Oh, and welcome to the forums... 🙂

If he can find a local part shop they may be willing to sell it to him on the cheap. Or if he has a tech hoarder friend like I do, he can just dig through the part box.

 

[yokana]

Thanks for your answers!

The pagination makes sense indeed, i guess it's completely related that using the *fast* OS (on usb) make the hard drive spin again at some point, losing all the benefit gained from the USB.

After thinking that through, even though the 1GB RAM doesn't seem that expensive on ebay I feel like buying a new hard drive (not that expensive either) / USB Stick + some ram (can't find more than 1GB) i will reach almost 100$ shipping included and buying a cheap used netbook at that price will probably give me better specs and a better battery life (0h for mine).

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Might be able to move pagefile to usb drive to keep HD from thrashing

Agree with others that it's just not cost effective to try and upgrade that lappy

 

[Ken g6]

If you do go for a USB stick for swap or whatever, consider a USB 3.0 stick. My understanding is that USB 2.0 sticks aren't usually designed to go as fast as the USB 2.0 standard will allow. While a USB 3.0 stick in a 2.0 port won't go at 3.0 speeds, it will max out the 2.0 speed. And, of course, you can get more use out of a 3.0 stick later. 🙂

 

[Sattern]

If you do go for a USB stick for swap or whatever, consider a USB 3.0 stick. My understanding is that USB 2.0 sticks aren't usually designed to go as fast as the USB 2.0 standard will allow. While a USB 3.0 stick in a 2.0 port won't go at 3.0 speeds, it will max out the 2.0 speed. And, of course, you can get more use out of a 3.0 stick later. 🙂

I strongly agree with this, if you don't use USB 3.0 expect it to take an hour or more longer than if you do.

 

[richaron]

I've booted live linux from USB 2.0 drives plenty of times. In general I've found USB 2.0 flash drives better than old laptop drives, probs because of random performance. I've also found the SD readers or USB controllers are often the limiting factor, so there's little point using a top of the line USB drives.

Of course, as others have said, your system is running out of RAM; Adding more will help. It's slowing to a crawl because your system is "swapping", i.e. using the hard drive as RAM because it's run out of actual RAM. Another thing you could do is move your "swap" onto a different drive from the OS (like another USB stick), that way your OS drive is not being smashed when you're swapping.

 

[inachu]

You can download Windows PE from microsoft for free and it lets you configure it for a bootable CD or USB device.