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What OS for a 512MB subnotebook

E

ET

Senior member
I have a Fujitsu P1510D, an old subnotebook which converts to a tablet. It is about as powerful as a netbook but has only 512MB, which is a serious limitation. It came with Windows XP (SP2) and it's too slow now for comfort. I'm thinking of buying at some point a new netbook or other such device, probably an AMD Ontario based one, but if I can make the P1510D usable for web browsing and such that's be nice.

The options I see are:

Reinstall XP. That should remove some of the extra baggage installed since, so it may be snappier. Still it will boot slowly and be limited.

Install Windows 7. I tried it in the Windows 7 beta days, and most things works (touch screen and such), even though the experience was less optimal than with XP in terms of making use of the features. Windows 7 isn't that great on a 512MB device, but it does support ReadyBoost, which makes life easier in this situation. Things that were horrifyingly slow on XP due to lack of RAM worked much better in 7 with ReadyBoost. But it still felt pretty slow.

The last option I see is some lightweight Linux. From what I've read it's possible (though not trivial) to get the hardware working under Linux, but it would probably be hard to pick something that's fast yet compatible, especially since I'm a Linux noob. Also web browsing unfortunately takes quite a bit of RAM these days so I wonder how well Linux will cope without some form of ReadyBoost. Perhaps it's possible to put the swap on an SD card, but I don't know if that'd work well.

So just wondering if anyone has a suggestion.
 
I'd try Linux first since it's free to try except for your time. I like Ubuntu. You could try some of the lighter variants, but they don't seem that much lighter to me, especially considering the feature cut. Ubuntu would be your best bet for compatibility out of the box. Puppy would be lighter, but may require more fiddling to get it working right.

If Linux doesn't work out for you, I'd use Win7. Like you said, Readyboost will help with the low ram, and you can strip a lot of the pretties out to make it pretty close to XP as far as overhead goes.
 
You can put Linux swap where ever you want, there's no artificial limitations on things like removable or network drives like Windows. Although if you do that you have to be very careful not to remove that volume without first unmounting the swap on it.

The biggest problem with either OS will be the browser, not the OS. You can use whatever Linux distribution you want, startup a light window manager like E16 but your browser is still going to want ~80% of your memory after you open a few tabs.
 
Thanks for the replies. The reason I want ReadyBoost, or hopefully get a similar effect with swap on a flash card (can't say how well that's work) is to overcome the issue with browser RAM footprint to an extent. It's possible that nothing will work.

I think I'll try Windows 7 for a start. I have a license I'm not currently using. One day I will use it on my desktop PC, but I can never bring myself to reformat it and reinstall everything, so continue to use Vista x64 (which IMO isn't bad). Linux has always been an uphill straggle for me, and though I have Linux Mint installed both on my disk and in a VM, and tried a few others, my experience has always been that trying anything other than the basics or if the hardware isn't detected fully, there's need for a lot of knowhow. I still always try it, I just don't have the patience to really get into it.
 
Windows 7 turned out to work better than I remembered. It's responsive and I was even able to research memory footprint using browsing in IE8 without feeling any slowdown. That's without ReadyBoost (but I do plan to add an SD card for that; but first to test that the SD slot works).

I ended up installing Firefox 3.6.13 with BarTab and Memory Fox, and I'll see how this works out.
 
Turns out I can buy 1GB of RAM on eBay for as little as $35 (original price was $350). That should bring the P1510D in line with netbooks and make it a little more comfortable to use.
 
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