What OS should I use on my older (P3 700 MHz) laptop?

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Perrupa

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 23, 2003
Messages
442
I got an older laptop a little while ago from my mom's company (Xerox) at one of their charity auctions, it's an old dell C600

specs:
PIII 750 MHz
128 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive

what I use it for:
- Wireless Internet
- MSN
- Browsing
- Watching videos/movies
- some coding/web developing

and I'm running XP on it right now.

what I'm basically looking for is an OS that will run faster on this machine than XP will, I'm thinking Windows 2000/NT or mandrake or something along those lines. I'm fine running in linux but my only aprehensions towards linux are difficulty in getting videos to work (I'm aware of mplayer but codecs are tricky, I find) and wireless ability. I've also heard that battery life is decreased due to lack of speed stepping or something of that sort.

Any comments, bits of information or recommendations are welcome, hell even turn this into a my distro is better than yours argument if you want but I'd rather not wait a year for gentoo to compile on this laptop :p

thanks in advance, Peace
 
Debian. Or you can use Ubuntu which is based off Debian, but is "n00b-friendly." I have heard good things about Yoper too, but I ahve not tried it.

Yoper does look like a good distro so I would check it out.
 
Speed step is supported under linux IIRC, maybe only on newer kernels though. Also mplayer codecs are no effor to find whatsoever, theres loads of them floating about.
 
Good to know speed step is supported but it's the "floating around" thing that gets to me :p
I enjoy the luxury of downloading the k-lite codec pack or other similar pack and never really having to worry about codecs ever :p

now if I went with debian which I've been thinking about trying for a while now how is its wireless as well as USB support? and what GUI would you recommend for speed?

thanks again for the quick replies :)

PS: I hate blackbox, shitty interface IMO
 
Perrupa said:
Good to know speed step is supported but it's the "floating around" thing that gets to me :p
I enjoy the luxury of downloading the k-lite codec pack or other similar pack and never really having to worry about codecs ever :p

now if I went with debian which I've been thinking about trying for a while now how is its wireless as well as USB support? and what GUI would you recommend for speed?

thanks again for the quick replies :)

PS: I hate blackbox, shitty interface IMO
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Have you tried Fluxbox? I personally love the interface, You wont get KDE or gnome running well I dont think, only other thing i can suggest is IceWM, but i havent used that for years.

AS far as codecs go, they are all right there on the mplayer homepage in the downloads section, but theres also VLC and other such if mplayer doesnt takle your fancy.

As far as usb goes you should be golden, wireless is a bit iffy, depends what kind of card you have (assuming not integrated at that age) linux-laptop.net is your friend.
 
Herulach said:
Have you tried Fluxbox? I personally love the interface, You wont get KDE or gnome running well I dont think, only other thing i can suggest is IceWM, but i havent used that for years.

AS far as codecs go, they are all right there on the mplayer homepage in the downloads section, but theres also VLC and other such if mplayer doesnt takle your fancy.

As far as usb goes you should be golden, wireless is a bit iffy, depends what kind of card you have (assuming not integrated at that age) linux-laptop.net is your friend.
Click to expand...


Nah, fluxbox looks about the same as blackbox, pretty but unusable in my opinion. I'm using a touchpad so I prefer it if everything can be done with left clicks and if I've got something fullscreened i'm not sure how you bring up the "start menu".

XFCE on the other hand looks pretty slick I must say, maybe I just like the look of it's default layout better I'm not sure but it looks easier to use.

anyways I was wondering if you guys had any windows suggestions as well at all? or is windows XP likely the fastest candidate for the job?

thanks again for the good suggestions/quick replies :)
 
Something that old school youre gonna be looking at 98, maybe nt4 if you can find a copy, but youll still be better with linux and a leightweight window manager imho.

As far as flux box goes it doesnt really have a start menu, but it does always keep a region of screen where you can right click to get your menu up, and now supports emacs like command strings.

Dont get too tempted by eye candy, youre prob gonna have to turn a lot of it off to get decent performance on a rig like that.
 
There is no need to run 98 on that. I have a Toshiba Satellite 1625 with a K6-2+ 550, and it ran XP just fine. I tried going back to 98 hoping for a performance boost, but the difference was small. 2000 Pro has given me the stability of the NT kernel, and the ability to play Divx files that would skip under XP.

Your machine is significantly more powerful than mine, so I don't know if you'll really see a difference going from XP to 2000. If you go back to 98 (not that you are considering it, but it was suggested) you'll quickly remember why you don't use it on your primary computer anymore.
 
repo man said:
There is no need to run 98 on that. I have a Toshiba Satellite 1625 with a K6-2+ 550, and it ran XP just fine. I tried going back to 98 hoping for a performance boost, but the difference was small. 2000 Pro has given me the stability of the NT kernel, and the ability to play Divx files that would skip under XP.

Your machine is significantly more powerful than mine, so I don't know if you'll really see a difference going from XP to 2000. If you go back to 98 (not that you are considering it, but it was suggested) you'll quickly remember why you don't use it on your primary computer anymore.
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I never reccomended it, well i did, but i certainly never said it would be good :) What amount of ram were you using in that to get XP running? At idle mine uses 140MB with themes off, thats why i said no xp
 
192 megs (64 built in, one 128 DIMM). It was no speed demon, but it wasn't too bad either. It works pretty well with 2000. At this point I feel the old harddrive is probably the limiting factor. But I plan on getting a 256 stick to replace the 128 as well. I rarely use this laptop, so there is no point in even thinking about a newer faster one.

Just noticing the OPs lack of RAM. Yes, XP is a RAM hog relative to 98. And though a P3 750 will smoke my machine, your harddrive is probably of similar vintage and speed to mine (slow). Low RAM means lots of writing to the slow harddrive. Why not try increasing the amount of RAM before changing your OS?
 
I'm actually waiting on some money before upping the ram in this laptop as I'm a poor ass university graduate at the moment but I will be adding 256 as soon as I have enough disposable income, as it is I need to save up like $3000-4000 this summer so I can go to Japan to teach english which is when this laptop will be my primary/only machine. so unfortunately buying more ram is a luxury I cannot, at the moment, afford. maybe I'll ask my parents to mail me some ram for christmas, ha ha ha :p

but yeah, definitely not going back to 98 as I do remember the pains of those days but I would definitely like to be able to do 2-3 things (browse, code, listen to music) at the same time without crazy load times. I'm pretty sure you're right about my slow hard drive being a big factor. damn paging :(

any other recommendations for light window managers for linux then? I'd like to give debian a try but supposedly it's hardware recognition is lacking. maybe ubuntu is for me?
 
After 2000 Pro became unusable, I installed Ubuntu 4.10 on a system very similar to yours. It's an old Dell Dimension desktop, PIII-733 / 128.

Ubuntu runs fine, but you can't use GNOME on it. Openbox, fluxbox, and Window Maker all run very well, though.
 
alexyang said:
After 2000 Pro became unusable, I installed Ubuntu 4.10 on a system very similar to yours. It's an old Dell Dimension desktop, PIII-733 / 128.

Ubuntu runs fine, but you can't use GNOME on it. Openbox, fluxbox, and Window Maker all run very well, though.
Click to expand...

those window managers are all the same awful type of interface, no idea how anyone can use those everyday :eek: but just curious, what made windows 2000 unusable?
 
Perrupa said:
those window managers are all the same awful type of interface, no idea how anyone can use those everyday :eek: but just curious, what made windows 2000 unusable?
Click to expand...
Nothing makes it unuseable, and Fluxbox is actually a hell of a lot nicer to use once you get used to it, it jsut takes a hell of a long time to transition, i particularly like it for laptops cos it requires a minimum of mouse input, and i bloody hate trackpads, they are the spawn of all that is unholy. Thats why the only laptops ill ever buy will be thinkpads.
 
I got an IBM A21M P3 700MHz with a 10G and 128M - Windows 2k runs just dandy on it. I recently upgraded to 320M RAM. Worth the $$. I wouldn't even think of going to Win98. I find 2k to be a bit faster than the XP install I tried.
 
I'm posting this from Fedora Core 3 on Xfce and the screenshots were misleading, it's pretty much just a slightly prettier black/flux/whateverbox wondows system, I might try using gnome but I know for a fact XP will be faster and the fact I can't get a resolution higher than 800x600 means I will most likely be switching back to XP. maybe I'll give it a bit more effort to try and get 1024x768 but if I can't get that res then I'll for sure be switching back to XP.

it's funny how linux always makes me appreciate XP more :p

time to go look for ways to up my resolution, thanks again for all th help guys! :)

Peace
 
Perrupa said:
I'm posting this from Fedora Core 3 on Xfce and the screenshots were misleading, it's pretty much just a slightly prettier black/flux/whateverbox wondows system, I might try using gnome but I know for a fact XP will be faster and the fact I can't get a resolution higher than 800x600 means I will most likely be switching back to XP. maybe I'll give it a bit more effort to try and get 1024x768 but if I can't get that res then I'll for sure be switching back to XP.

it's funny how linux always makes me appreciate XP more :p

time to go look for ways to up my resolution, thanks again for all th help guys! :)

Peace
Click to expand...
Probably the easiest way for you to change the resolution is to load up gnome, and wade through the treacle it will be to do it in the gui, but the fastest way will be to go old school and break out vi on the config files. this guide is for gentoo and X.org, but the config files will be the same layout, although god knows where they will be on your system, id be temppted by /etc/X11/somewhere. XP is a hell of a lot nicer for stuff like that,its an unfortunate thing about linux, that you need decent hardware to get a lot of the nice gui stuff to work right. You might also want to look into prelink, theres plenty of guides about for it, it basically goes through and pre loads all the stuff from librarys straight into your executables, which speeds up load times a lot, although you do loose som disk space.

Personally id view it as a learning experience, the lack of ram means you arent gonna be able to use KDE/gnomes nice gui features to tune things, so youll have to learn how to do it, which is useful, if you want to learn, personally id love an old box to test a proper linux install on, its a bit awkward for me to take my main rig down, since it gets used so much. But if youre nto interested in learning stuff like that (i.e: youre not as big a geek as me) then youre prob best off with 2000/XP
 
Herulach said:
Probably the easiest way for you to change the resolution is to load up gnome, and wade through the treacle it will be to do it in the gui, but the fastest way will be to go old school and break out vi on the config files. this guide is for gentoo and X.org, but the config files will be the same layout, although god knows where they will be on your system, id be temppted by /etc/X11/somewhere. XP is a hell of a lot nicer for stuff like that,its an unfortunate thing about linux, that you need decent hardware to get a lot of the nice gui stuff to work right. You might also want to look into prelink, theres plenty of guides about for it, it basically goes through and pre loads all the stuff from librarys straight into your executables, which speeds up load times a lot, although you do loose som disk space.

Personally id view it as a learning experience, the lack of ram means you arent gonna be able to use KDE/gnomes nice gui features to tune things, so youll have to learn how to do it, which is useful, if you want to learn, personally id love an old box to test a proper linux install on, its a bit awkward for me to take my main rig down, since it gets used so much. But if youre nto interested in learning stuff like that (i.e: youre not as big a geek as me) then youre prob best off with 2000/XP
Click to expand...

Are you calling my geekitude into question??? HAVE AT YOU!!!!

nah, I figured XP would just be much nicer for that sort of thing though I think I'm going to set up a Myth TV Box in my living room on an old P3 500 box I have. get some MAME or SNES emulator going or something. I've been playing SNES recently but can't find my damn Zelda cartridge. but yeah thanks a lot for the help guys.

one day when I'm 1337 enough I'd love to try and tackle some of the usability issues with linux. like display properties or device management, those two things drive me nuts in *nix. like getting the extra buttons on my MX700 recognized or getting dual monitors working or something, though at this point I'm just talking out of my ass :p

Peace and thanks again for the help *nix guys :)
 
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