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What to do with old notebook

M

marcplante

Senior member
I got an old notebook from my mother. HP model 1000 (?) 256 MB of RAM, slow single processor (1.2 ghz?) but it's clean and in decent shape. It's pretty slow with even Windows XP. Is there a flavor of linux I can load that is light enough that I can salvage this as a basic browsing and email terminal to have lying around the house?

I haven't worked with Linux before, so I figure this would be a great orientation.

TIA
 
Sounds like your mom gave you a HP DV1000. That was one of the best and most reliable notebooks made by HP. I have one that has been in a bag for two years. I keep it on hand for use by my grandkids when they come to visit. It keeps them away from my good systems. It has XP Pro and is very adequate for surfing, email, and most anything but HD gaming.

I guess your mom gave it to you instead. So, do with it what you will - and there is always the option of giving it to someone less fortunate than yourself. 🙂
 
K...sorry, things have been hectic at work. it's actually an HP *ZE*1000. has XP home on it, 40G HD, 256MB of RAM with no option to upgrade RAM...so. I'm going to spend my Christmas break (I hope) figuring out which flavor of Linux to plug in. This thing takes 15 minutes to boot, and there really isn't anything installed on it. i figure an OS+apps that can run from a thumb drive should give it a little more breathing room. DSL is looking like a likely candidate. We have a video player in the van for the kids who are a little young. Actually, my 4 yr old is getting my wife's old Toshiba since she's getting a quad core HP notebook for Christmas. The Toshiba is ready for a four year old in all sorts of ways.
 
marcplante said:
K...sorry, things have been hectic at work. it's actually an HP *ZE*1000. has XP home on it, 40G HD, 256MB of RAM with no option to upgrade .
Click to expand...

I have an old Thinkpad T20 with 512 MB RAM running XP. 512 was the max ram allowed.
It was slow, slow, slow. Barely usable with FireFox. Could not run IE because it used too much memory. Running IE7 with several tabs open and Avira AntiVir, it allocated more than 512 memory and was unusable. I had a 7200 rpm, 80 gb hard drive. As soon as XP allocated more memory than 512, the T20 slowed down to the painful point.

I switched to Norton Internet Security which used less memory and to FireFox that used less memory. Typically it needed 400+ MB memory to browse the web. In that config it was barely usable.

I tried Ubuntu Linux. That was just as slow as XP and I found the ui clumsy. I stopped using Ubuntu because I saw no advantage.

Bottom line, open up task manager and look at memory allocated. Since you have only 256 MB memory available, I don't think that you will be able to find anyway to use the notebook. It is recycle time.
 
Jesus, i have a laptop with 256mb ram and a old celeron processor based on the p4 with a screaming 4200RPM HDD, and it boots xp nearly the same as my i7@3.8ghz and windows 7... Yea its not a powerhouse computer, but it has no problem handling basic stuff like you guys describe... torrents/firefox/Movies at the same time is no problem for it, maybe you guys need to streamline the OS a little more
 
True, there was a point in time where 512mb was a standard for xp and 1gb was more of a luxuury. 256mb does seem quite little though, maybe nlite could help a bit? I love how nlite turned my xp inside vbox real lightweight.
 
LongTimePCUser said:
I have an old Thinkpad T20 with 512 MB RAM running XP. 512 was the max ram allowed.
It was slow, slow, slow. Barely usable with FireFox. Could not run IE because it used too much memory. Running IE7 with several tabs open and Avira AntiVir, it allocated more than 512 memory and was unusable. I had a 7200 rpm, 80 gb hard drive. As soon as XP allocated more memory than 512, the T20 slowed down to the painful point.

I switched to Norton Internet Security which used less memory and to FireFox that used less memory. Typically it needed 400+ MB memory to browse the web. In that config it was barely usable.

I tried Ubuntu Linux. That was just as slow as XP and I found the ui clumsy. I stopped using Ubuntu because I saw no advantage.

Bottom line, open up task manager and look at memory allocated. Since you have only 256 MB memory available, I don't think that you will be able to find anyway to use the notebook. It is recycle time.
Click to expand...

I have a hard time believing this. My old desktop (sure it isn't a notebook but that doesn't matter) was a Celeron clocked at 900Mhz with 192MB of ram, and a 20GB HDD that ran Xp Pro fine. Not great, but definitely usable.
 
This might be taboo, but I actually like Windows 2000 for older laptops. I have a 700Mhz Celeron laptop with 192MB ram. I have tried WinXP Pro and various forms of linux. To me, Win2K is just more usable than any of them. I updated to SP4, installed Firefox 3, and it runs fine.
 
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