lightweight os

[grutomo]

Ahoy lads! I just bought a cheap old laptop that I'm planning to use for college. I bought it secondhand and it is currently running windows 10. It's f**king awful. It runs painfully slow and sluggish, it feels extremely heavy and downright unusable. I'm not sure why the previous owner tried to put windows 10 on this ancient piece of hardware but whatever. 

 

Anyway, because of that I am looking for a lightweight operating system that's at least compatible with most apps, programs, and hopefully games. I've heard a lot of suggestions such as bodhi linux, manjaro linux, elementary os, tiny10, and even chrome os. So I'm curious to hear your suggestions. Much love and thank you in advance

 

Edit, some additional information:

It has a core i3 1.9ghz cpu, 8gb of ddr3 ram, 120gb ssd, and an intel hd 4600 igpu. I want it to do mainly basic tasks and hopefully some light gaming if i can like stardew valley or something.

[kelvinhall05]

If you'll mainly be doing browser work I do think ChromeOS is your best bet. If that's not enough, I would either use Mint if you've never used Linux before and don't want a steep learning curve, or Arch with XFCE, LXDE, or a different lightweight DE. The install is a pretty decent learning experience if you prefer getting thrown in the deep end instead of slowly easing into Linux.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Run it on windows 7 if you need compatibility for windows apps.

 

If you would like to keep recieving updates for awhile id suggest windows 8.1

 

Windows 10 will run like crap on most decade old hardware cause it has alot of bloat and even if you debloat it you are gonna have to do that over and over every single update.

 

If you can swap to linux then do it, will recieve updates for a loooong time even on 10 or 15 year old hardware, id suggest linux mint as a starting point.

[jaslion]

Kelvinhall05 gave some good suggestions.

 

However this is an old laptop so I have a feeling it is very slow due to thermal issues and getting a lighter os does not fix that.

 

Can you instal hwmonitor and check the temps when doing basic stuff?

 

What i3 is this there is no 4th gen i3 that runs at 1.1ghz. The lowest end one runs at 1.3ghz and whilst slow should still be ok for web tasks.

[grutomo]

57 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Kelvinhall05 gave some good suggestions.

 

However this is an old laptop so I have a feeling it is very slow due to thermal issues and getting a lighter os does not fix that.

 

Can you instal hwmonitor and check the temps when doing basic stuff?

 

What i3 is this there is no 4th gen i3 that runs at 1.1ghz. The lowest end one runs at 1.3ghz and whilst slow should still be ok for web tasks.

that is a very good point, i might have to open it up later. also the cpu actually runs at 1.9 gh (my bad) and it has 2 cores and 2 threads

[jaslion]

Just now, grutomo said:

that is a very good point, i might have to open it up later. also the cpu actually runs at 1.9 gh (my bad) and it has 2 cores and 2 threads

Might also want to reinstall windows just in case. EIther way I use a tablet with a i5 4200y + 4gb of ram and it is ok in windows 10 the ram is the biggest issue and the i3 2375m with 8gb of ram and a ssd does pretty well for being the office's public browser machine. So I am indeed a bit confused as to why a device that is better than that is godawfully slow.

[grutomo]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

Might also want to reinstall windows just in case. EIther way I use a tablet with a i5 4200y + 4gb of ram and it is ok in windows 10 the ram is the biggest issue and the i3 2375m with 8gb of ram and a ssd does pretty well for being the office's public browser machine. So I am indeed a bit confused as to why a device that is better than that is godawfully slow.

yeah i think there is something wrong with the internals but i dont really have the time or the money to fix it right now so it's kind of a temp solution.

thank you so much btw

[jaslion]

2 minutes ago, grutomo said:

yeah i think there is something wrong with the internals but i dont really have the time or the money to fix it right now so it's kind of a temp solution.

thank you so much btw

I would look at the temps first and see what it up with those. A quick blowout with some compressed air and a rougher paint brush will do wonders if it is needed. Also a quick windows reinstall just to be sure.

[dragonfly43]

Try MX Linux.

If you need Windows then install it in VirtualBox.

It's strange that a machine like yours run like molass, may be it contains lot of spywares, malwares...

[xAcid9]

On 6/24/2021 at 7:35 PM, grutomo said:

It has a core i3 1.9ghz cpu, 8gb of ddr3 ram, 120gb ssd, and an intel hd 4600 igpu.

Those are actually not bad for Windows 10. Can you confirm the spec? I don't think you get HD4600 with an i3.