What os for an older laptop

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kenprescott21

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 13, 2008
Messages
248
Gateway 450ROG
Intel Pentium M (1.73 GHz)
1Gb Ram
120Gig Harddrive

Looking between windows 7, Ubuntu 8.10, XP or Vista.

Now I was thinking since this thing came installed with xp to stay with xp, but how well would any of the others run? I searched for what OS's are good for older laptops but really didnt find anything.
 
XP will work fine as will win2k
You can pretty much use anything on it.

Vista Home Basic would even work just fine. I have Vista Basic on similar laptop but with half the ram (512) and it was fine.
 
Well, XP will run fine, some *nix distro will probably run fine (dunno what wireless cards you may have in it, you'll find support for various card varies from distro to distro). But you have to consider what you do on the laptop, if you're comfy with *nix, and the apps you need to use are avail for it.
Vista will be a bit painful on it...almost usable if you can at least double the RAM and slap a 7,200rpm drive in there.
Windows 7 will run better on it than Vista.....but if you install W7 now, you'll be reinstalling middle of the summer when the Beta runs out. Feel like doing that?
 
Just for shits and giggles, I installed Windows 7 build 7000 on my mother's old Toshiba A15-S157 laptop with a Celeron and 512mb RAM, and it actually works lol

No Aero or anything like that though, but it ran pretty well.

Just thought I'd throw that in.
 
XP Media Center Edition runs pretty well on my HP Pavilion dv9005us (AMD TL-50 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM)...which it probably should, being the intended OS for it. I picked up another gig of RAM and plopped a 7 beta (7022) on it for kicks, and it's actually not that bad apart from Aero or whatever this version of it is dragging the integrated video down a bit.
 
Looking for my windows 7 download, the one i burned only worked for 64 bit, got a 32bit key, no 32bit ftl.

PM Links anyone?
 
I think MS closed the direct downloads already. Only keys are available now. All the direct links I found are dead. There's always P2P if you don't have access to technet at work. :p
 
If you have a legit key for XP on there, just use that IMO. The hardware isn't old enough to justify windows 2000 on there, but on the other hand I think Vista might be a bit much. Also I noticed your laptop has an older mobility radeon card. Driver support in vista for many older mobility radeons is pretty bad, in fact, for many, they won't even work in XP with a driver version newer than Catalyst 5.6.
 
XP would probably be the most likely choice, especially if you didn't want to use Linux. I'd bet Vista Basic would run very well on that too.
 
I went ahead and decided to install ubuntu 8.10. I tried it before it installed and it picked up everything including my wireless card. Plus im happy to have atleast one linux system around.
 
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