Best free/fast OS for a netbook?

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celery952

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First post here! Long time lurker here...... So I just inherited an old msi eeepc atom n270 that cant be upgraded from the 1gb of ram that it has. Im just wanting to surf the web with it and maybe have it for my 3 yr old to play with and learn on. I at least am gonna grab a small ssd for it, but dont have a clue about anything but windows. It has xp on it and its slow as dirt! I guess it doesnt even have to be free, Id be willing to pay for something that would breathe new life into this thing. Thanks in advance!

Bryan
 
The Atom processor is going to be the biggest limitation (even more than the RAM limitation) of doing much of anything "fast" so even putting a small SSD in it simply won't change that, it's going to be slow and laggy, plain and simple. If it's an actual EeePC it was made by Asus, not that big of a deal but if you go looking for drivers and use the MSI brand name it'll be tough to get 'em. ;)

In this day and age for such an older piece of hardware I'd actually recommend something like Ubuntu Mini Remix which should work fine on that machine but you'll need to get everything set up. The reason I recommend that OS is because Windows is just asking for trouble overall in terms of potential malware, etc. and it would be easier to maintain using Ubuntu knowing that an errant piece of malware or even a virus won't bring it down - also, if you're using Windows you'll basically need to use anti-virus which will tap the already limited resources of the not-all-that-powerful-already Netbook.

See how things work out with that OS and if they don't offer a level of performance you consider worth it, then give something like PuppyLinux a try which is even smaller and less resource intensive, but I wouldn't recommend keeping XP on it, or Vista, or even Windows 7 because of the resource requirements and certainly not 8/8.1 or 10 either, it's just not going to be possible to use it at all to any given degrees with those OSes on it.
 
ya your cpu is going to make it a painfully slow experience even just browsing websites.
 
celery952 said:
First post here! Long time lurker here...... So I just inherited an old msi eeepc atom n270 that cant be upgraded from the 1gb of ram that it has. Im just wanting to surf the web with it and maybe have it for my 3 yr old to play with and learn on. I at least am gonna grab a small ssd for it, but dont have a clue about anything but windows. It has xp on it and its slow as dirt! I guess it doesnt even have to be free, Id be willing to pay for something that would breathe new life into this thing. Thanks in advance!

Bryan
Click to expand...
It may just need to be reinstalled. But things like YouTube are going to be slow with any OS because the CPU simply isn't fast enough to play HD video.

But if you want to test an alternate OS, use something like Mint or use Mate UI that doesn't use fancy 3D accelerated UI like Ubutnu.
 
I don't think a distro that has fancy GPU accelerated UI is going to be a good option for a slow netbook.
 
bigdogchris said:
It may just need to be reinstalled. But things like YouTube are going to be slow with any OS because the CPU simply isn't fast enough to play HD video.
Click to expand...
So true. The N270 cpu and chipset is just too slow. On mine, I have to play youtube at 360p or else it lags.
 
bigdogchris said:
I don't think a distro that has fancy GPU accelerated UI is going to be a good option for a slow netbook.
Click to expand...

Most distro's allow you to switch between hardware accelerated and software rendered desktop compositors.
 
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