I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
Oh yeah, I completely forgot, that laptops real old, so go ahead and regrease the cpu.
I have two roughly 10 years old laptop that is completely usable, how do I go about regreasing the cpu (M14x r2 & A1502)?
Locate the service manuals or some kind of tear down. Confirm that the process will be within your capability. Order some thermal compound. Disassemble the laptop until you remove the heatsink from the cpu. Clean the old cpu and heatsink with isopropyl until it’s as clean as can possibly be. Apply new thermal compound. Reassemble laptop.
this might be the service manual for the alienware
A1502 could be a lot of laptops, use the emc number or serial to find out which one or just look for the MacBook Pro NN,n number in the about option under the Apple menu. It doesn’t matter which one you have, they’re all really easy to work on and well documented.
Check on youtube there is probably a video on how to open and do it your laptop model
could always give antix linux a shot
@maliciousonion personally I’d go with Debian + IceWM on that. Works pretty well.
JWM is my suggestion. It’s a window manager that doesn’t require almost any knowledge or key bindings to use and it has all necessary stuff included out of the box afaik. You can also use xdgmenumaker to make the right click/Start menu better.
Try puppy linux ?
It’s a bit on the complicated side but still a good distro.
If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.
Time flies, where a HDD is barely enough to run a minimal Linux.
I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter’s first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it’s pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling…
Hopefully it got standard SATA connector.
without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point
You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.
Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.
I can speak from experience that it is worth it. It won’t be a super speed demon, but it will make it somewhat more usable. I’ve done so with my Asus Eee PC 901 netbook which has the two PATA SSDs. Those SSDs are SUPER slow compared to the cheapest mSATA SSD you can find with more than double the space, and all you need is a MiniPCI-to-mSATA adapter (the Eee PC 901’s drive slots are MiniPCI). I documented all about it here: https://claudiomiranda.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/my-geeeky-experiment-part-3/
I’m running OpenBSD/i386 on mine which isn’t as fast as something like Linux, but it definitely felt faster even with OpenBSD after the hardware upgrade. I also increased the RAM to 2 GB which is the maximum amount supported.
Yeah, it’s not quick, there is no noticeable difference in speed. Random read should be much quicker. But you can’t really buy ide hdds anymore and they will die sooner or later, and the price of small m.2 sata ssds are falling.
Still worth it, for the latency elimination alone. But also I expect a SSD would saturate the IDE connection whereas a HDD rarely would.
I have a similar device Intel atom, 1gb RAM. I installed arch and use it as a headless computer (without DE/WM). If I need WM I use sway. Use a minimal browser like Qutebrowser. Although it would also run like shit but better than chrome/firefox.
Zram
Try antix. its requirements are 256mb ram. And it’s actually usable.
You can try something like antiX but it won’t do good as a desktop. I use my netbook as a home server with pi-hole in it.
Do not run Slitaz as is fully of security problems and vulnerabilities. What’s worse is that there website has security holes on it. There is a page on the bug tracker that runs arbitrary JavaScript and prints out the time as an example. It also has been abandoned and is no longer maintained all that well.
1gb of ram is quiet a bit. I’ve ran Debian Xfce4 on simular hardware it it works with a few tabs. The problem is the modern internet is graphics heavy and the old GPU doesn’t have a lot of power. If you don’t block ads with Ublock origin it will grind to a halt as the video and image rendering will be done by the CPU as the GPU is to old.
I’ve ran Debian Xfce4 on simular hardware
OP did say he tried Debian with xfce and it was slow, I don’t see the point in insisting on using that
SSD upgrade
And then ZRAM and swap like hell
Won’t that kill the SSD on short notice? Or can they make do with it for years?
I mean, worth the tradeoff? Zram would just make the cpu work more. Swap… kill the ssd
But over time. SSDs can handle a lot, like a couple of years?
Won’t be a couple of years if you’re constantly swapping, no.
Not really, if you would spend a lot more on SDD drives instead of getting a modern computer
I thought it’s either swap or ZRAM - could you use both at the same time?
Yes Fedora uses swap and zram by default. Just compresses the memory in RAM (more memory available) and on disk (less data written, less wear)
Wow, that’s supercool actually! I had no idea…
This will be the single biggest change you can make. Swapping an hdd for a cheap 256gb ssd will make a bigger difference than any DE changes.
On a laptop that old, I highly recommend a 32 bit distro.
Q4OS with Trinity: https://q4os.org/
Antix https://antixlinux.com/
DSL https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
You could also enable ZRAM If it is not already.
replace HDD with SSD, number one thing to do if possible.
lxde or lxqt are quite a bit lighter then xfce.
you could try tiny core linux. it really depends what programs you want to run.
Use Dietpi as your main distro, do a minimal install, install sway and then your usual stuff.
t. Got a orange pi zero 3 w/ 1GiB of ram, did exactly as my suggestion implies and everything works as intended.