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Here is my netbook's specs:

CPU: Intel ATOM N270 @1.60GHz with single core - hyperthreaded

RAM: 2GB DDR2 @800MHz

HDD: 160 GB

Pre-installed OS: Windows XP SP3

Designed OS: Windows XP. Windows 7

Is there another OS, non-Windows that can run on this netbook smoothly for Internet and Office Processing?

 

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3 minutes ago, SpecsTacular said:

Here is my netbook's specs:

CPU: Intel ATOM N270 @1.60GHz with single core - hyperthreaded

RAM: 2GB DDR2 @800MHz

HDD: 160 GB

Pre-installed OS: Windows XP SP3

Designed OS: Windows XP. Windows 7

Is there another OS, non-Windows that can run on this netbook smoothly for Internet and Office Processing?

 

start with Lubuntu, notice that even that runs horribly, throw it away and find a better one, I think even Pentium 4 ones ran better.

Yours faithfully

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1 minute ago, Lord Nicoll said:

start with Lubuntu, notice that even that runs horribly, throw it away and find a better one, I think even Pentium 4 ones ran better.

I'll trow you instead?

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Just now, SpecsTacular said:

I'll trow you instead?

Atom processors really are bad, I mean you can live with a celeron, but Atom's are pretty bad. All jokes aside Lubuntu should run Ok on it, it's really light weight and runs well on older hardware, maybe try and older version for a bit of added headroom.

Yours faithfully

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Just now, Lord Nicoll said:

Atom processors really are bad, I mean you can live with a celeron, but Atom's are pretty bad. All jokes aside Lubuntu should run Ok on it, it's really light weight and runs well on older hardware, maybe try and older version for a bit of added headroom.

But bro, I do not even work that is why I can't trow this thing. It helped me do my school tasks with this especially it is portable. I have a desktop that runs i3 but I cannot carry it to school. Well when I have my job in the future, I plan to change it anyway. :) 

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Just now, SpecsTacular said:

But bro, I do not even work that is why I can't trow this thing. It helped me do my school tasks with this especially it is portable. I have a desktop that runs i3 but I cannot carry it to school. Well when I have my job in the future, I plan to change it anyway. :) 

Well look forward to it, I remember when I moved from a terrible laptop, it was a really happy day, hell a happy month, look forward to it. 

Yours faithfully

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7 hours ago, SpecsTacular said:

But bro, I do not even work that is why I can't trow this thing. It helped me do my school tasks with this especially it is portable. I have a desktop that runs i3 but I cannot carry it to school. Well when I have my job in the future, I plan to change it anyway. :) 

Go dumpster diving - even a Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo!) runs a hell of a lot better, than one of those. Lubuntu is to bloated to begin with, so if you want it to run "good enough to use it as a type writer", you should look in to Pixel, Arch Linux or even Gentoo. But that's a lot of work...

 

And even if you can't go dumpster diving - go on ebay, you'll find older Business Laptops (Dell Latitude D820, Thinkpads, HP Elitebooks) for around $30 (or depending on where you live even less, i've just sold an old D620 with a Core Duo for 20 €) dirt cheap and pretty much EVERYTHING is faster, than that. You can even use a Centrio Single-Core with 1,7 GHz with Lubuntu pretty nice, if you don't plan on watching any youtube videos...

Good news everyone...!

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Like I said in another similar topic, no matter what distro you use, a slow CPU will not work faster. Light distros are useful only because they load faster (from HDD) and use less RAM so you have more available for your applications. But once a destkop environment loads it mostly sits dormant. So it doesn't help me neither gets in the way of loading LibreOffice. LibreOffice will take the same time to load on Puppy Linux as it will on KDE. And YouTube in 720p will stress the CPU in the same way, even if I could run it on Windows 95 (which works even on computers with 8MB of RAM).

 

Should make a page on the Internet to break this myth of light distros :)

 

So to finalize: use a light distro so it loads faster and you don't get bored at the loading screen and use a light browser. For example Chrome/Chromium will be slow to load sites on that CPU on bloated sites, mostly because of a feature that compiles JavaScript to machine code.

 

Focus on finding light applications that you use often.

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22 minutes ago, slicknux said:

Like I said in another similar topic, no matter what distro you use, a slow CPU will not work faster. Light distros are useful only because they load faster (from HDD) and use less RAM so you have more available for your applications. But once a destkop environment loads it mostly sits dormant. So it doesn't help me neither gets in the way of loading LibreOffice. LibreOffice will take the same time to load on Puppy Linux as it will on KDE. And YouTube in 720p will stress the CPU in the same way, even if I could run it on Windows 95 (which works even on computers with 8MB of RAM).

 I disagree with you on the dormancy of a DE. Gnome and KDE use a lot of CPU Power just to "show" you clock, maybe some Temperatures or even the Windows. And even then, Xorgs CPU Usage is dependent on what DE you use, since KDE and Gnome use draw calls to update the Screen, while Openbox and others do not, they most of the time use the frame buffer - as they do not have any animations or anything, that needs to be kind of pre rendered, so that it reacts fast enough.

22 minutes ago, slicknux said:

Should make a page on the Internet to break this myth of light distros :)

 

So to finalize: use a light distro so it loads faster and you don't get bored at the loading screen and use a light browser. For example Chrome/Chromium will be slow to load sites on that CPU on bloated sites, mostly because of a feature that compiles JavaScript to machine code.

 

Focus on finding light applications that you use often.

Surfing with an Atom CPU was a PITA back when they where "new". I'd recommend using uBlock and NoScript and turning on, what you really need to look at selectively.

Good news everyone...!

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Xubuntu is the best by far. I had a netbook with an N270 and 1GB of RAM and it ran flawlessly with Xubuntu.

Main rig on profile

VAULT - File Server

Spoiler

Intel Core i5 11400 w/ Shadow Rock LP, 2x16GB SP GAMING 3200MHz CL16, ASUS PRIME Z590-A, 2x LSI 9211-8i, Fractal Define 7, 256GB Team MP33, 3x 6TB WD Red Pro (general storage), 3x 1TB Seagate Barracuda (dumping ground), 3x 8TB WD White-Label (Plex) (all 3 arrays in their respective Windows Parity storage spaces), Corsair RM750x, Windows 11 Education

Sleeper HP Pavilion A6137C

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Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.4GHz, 4x8GB G.SKILL Ares 1800MHz CL10, ASUS Z170M-E D3, 128GB Team MP33, 1TB Seagate Barracuda, 320GB Samsung Spinpoint (for video capture), MSI GTX 970 100ME, EVGA 650G1, Windows 10 Pro

Mac Mini (Late 2020)

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Apple M1, 8GB RAM, 256GB, macOS Sonoma

Consoles: Softmodded 1.4 Xbox w/ 500GB HDD, Xbox 360 Elite 120GB Falcon, XB1X w/2TB MX500, Xbox Series X, PS1 1001, PS2 Slim 70000 w/ FreeMcBoot, PS4 Pro 7015B 1TB (retired), PS5 Digital, Nintendo Switch OLED, Nintendo Wii RVL-001 (black)

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2 hours ago, David89 said:

 I disagree with you on the dormancy of a DE. Gnome and KDE use a lot of CPU Power just to "show" you clock, maybe some Temperatures

Plugins/widgets coded well should use an insignificant amount of CPU time. Never saw this on my computer. And "a lot of CPU power" would just mean something is horribly wrong somewhere.

 

2 hours ago, David89 said:

And even then, Xorgs CPU Usage is dependent on what DE you use, since KDE and Gnome use draw calls to update the Screen, while Openbox and others do not, they most of the time use the frame buffer

(With simple effects) KDE and Gnome are more efficient graphics-wise if the hardware/drivers setup are right. Running it on the wrong combinations has generated this "compositing window managers are heavy bro" myth. I remember seeing people with computers better than mine running Windows 7 with that blocky 2000s look because they disabled all eye candy and effects. I benchmarked various things and saw negligible difference but they all thought stuff runs faster because of placebo effect. It took the same time to load heavy applications and render stuff. The only difference was like a few tens of megabytes less memory used. Losing aesthetics just to load an extra WordPad doesn't seem like a gain to me.

 

A compositing window manager offloads a lot of work to the GPU which IS where calculating pixel positions and colors should happen anyway. Why should my CPU work on calculating lines and rectangles and such?

 

Here's what the author of a window manager has to say:

https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/compositing-and-lightweight-desktops/

 

And I found this even more interesting:

https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/10/power-saving-and-desktop-effects/

 

Quote

With compositing disabled the X Server becomes responsible for rendering the screen again.

Quote

But it’s using OpenGL, that’s expensive on the GPU!

Well think about it. Someone has to bring your updated windows on the screen. This someone is the graphics card. You need it anyway, no matter whether it is KWin or the X Server. KWin uses OpenGL to do the rendering, which means it’s hardware accelerated.

And as a P.S.: anything that sits in the background, just waiting for interaction should strive to use close to 0% CPU. If it isn't, it's coded by a monkey and he should get a job at EA Games. I remember playing Need for Speed Underground 2 and thinking my video card was total crap. And then Half Life 2 worked flawlessly at max settings with over 60FPS while also looking so much better. And we have no examples of unoptimized code here. NFS wasn't unoptimized, it was craptimized. Like one thing that should normally take 1ms takes 20ms because the "programmer" over complicated some simple stuff. And then Half Life is an example of coding poetry and excellent optimization. But I digress...

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I have a netbook with 1gb ram and dsl worked superbly. It's not recommended by others here but it's 50mb and super fast. 

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On ‎29‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 5:56 AM, fpo said:

I have a netbook with 1gb ram and dsl worked superbly. It's not recommended by others here but it's 50mb and super fast. 

I was literally just about to post about dsl, so much software in 50MB of data. 

 

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

                     ¸„»°'´¸„»°'´ Vorticalbox `'°«„¸`'°«„¸
`'°«„¸¸„»°'´¸„»°'´`'°«„¸Scientia Potentia est  ¸„»°'´`'°«„¸`'°«„¸¸„»°'´

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If you want to do basic functionality and watch videos on it then I recommend installing ChromiumOS on it, it will breath new life into your netbook. I have an old HP Mini 210 from 2010 (Intel Atom N550 and 2GB of RAM) that I still use and was impressed that I could stream Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube in fullscreen smoothly with CloudReady's ChromiumOS on a thumb drive (I never installed it to the hard drive because I still use Windows 10 on the netbook for telnet and serial connections to switches). With Google Docs you're all set.

-KuJoe

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5 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

I was literally just about to post about dsl, so much software in 50MB of data. 

 

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

Op, seriously do dsl, I have someone backing me up. 

 

Ignorr everyonebelses bloated solutions. DSL is all you need in life. 

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On a single-core CPU with those specs, basically anything will chug along.  And as has been mentioned, YouTube videos will always struggle on that processor, just due to its low specs.  And Chrome/Firefox/Chromium are probably not going to perform all that well--look into some of the lightweight browsers like Midori.

 

All that said, you've got some options that might be worth a look:

  • SliTaz: a very lightweight, fully-featured OS that takes up very little disk space.  I've used this before on ancient single-core computers and it tends to work pretty well while also being generally usable for basic tasks.
  • Tiny Core: Damn Small Linux developers who left because they felt DSL was too bloated.  (Unlike DSL, this one is still actively maintained).  Extremely minimal--you can get an image for ~12MB--but as a result, it's lacking a lot of functionality.  But if you just need to do document editing and some very light web browsing, it should do you.  Just be aware that you may have to go install all the programs you want by hand, especially if you get one of the smaller images.
  • Puppy Linux: less lightweight than SliTaz or Tiny Core, but more user-friendly.

You could also try Arch, which does an extremely minimalistic installation (but takes a good bit of work to install compared to other distros).  Debian has a "network install" image that's pretty similar in this regard--it installs just the core Debian components, and you pick what to install on top of it.  But the configuration is rather more hands-on and time-consuming this way.

 

Really, though, if you can, your best option is to find a computer with better specs.  Dell and HP should have some laptops for at or around $200 new.  If you live near somewhere like a Free Geek you might be able to get a more powerful computer, albeit a refurbished one, for a comparable price.  Or really anywhere that sells used and/or refurbished electronics.

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On ‎26‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 4:59 AM, SpecsTacular said:

Here is my netbook's specs:

CPU: Intel ATOM N270 @1.60GHz with single core - hyperthreaded

RAM: 2GB DDR2 @800MHz

HDD: 160 GB

Pre-installed OS: Windows XP SP3

Designed OS: Windows XP. Windows 7

Is there another OS, non-Windows that can run on this netbook smoothly for Internet and Office Processing?

 

CLoudready it is a Free google OS that runs all google stuff and basically is an every day OS

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