Linux for an old laptop

[FRARICHY]

Hi everyone, I have got an old Asus Eee notebook with an Intel N435 N455 @ 1,66 GHz (dual core) and 2GB of RAM (the maximum for the Celeron N455). I want to use it plugged to a television in my room to watch Prime Video, Youtube, Disney+, ect.  What distro of Linux do you reccomend for this use?

[emosun]

that processor isn;t capable of playing back video in a web browser.

It's equivalent to an almost 20 year old pentium 4

[Somerandomtechyboi]

5 minutes ago, FRARICHY said:

Hi everyone, I have got an old Asus Eee notebook with an Intel N435 N455 @ 1,66 GHz (dual core) and 2GB of RAM (the maximum for the Celeron N455). I want to use it plugged to a television in my room to watch Prime Video, Youtube, Disney+, ect.  What distro of Linux do you reccomend for this use?

Stick to w7, run tron script to basically debloat it, Download setfsb and overclock it, a few tutorials for ocing eee laptops with setfsb.

 

I dont think setfsb supports linux which sucks so youll have to stick to w7 cause ocing the atom

 

You will most likely get around 1.9ghz maybe even 2ghz if you are lucky

[FRARICHY]

Even if I install ChromeOS?

 

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, FRARICHY said:

Even if I install ChromeOS?

 

this laptop is 10 times slower than a free office pc from the mid 2000's.

the only reson you would attampt to use it to watch web video today would just be for some weird challenge to yourself and it

[FRARICHY]

1 minute ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Stick to w7, run tron script to basically debloat it, Download setfsb and overclock it, a few tutorials for ocing eee laptops with setfsb.

 

I dont think setfsb supports linux which sucks so youll have to stick to w7 cause ocing the atom

Asus shipped the notebook with Windows Xp or Windows 7. Witch one is the best for my use?

 

[emosun]

1 minute ago, FRARICHY said:

Asus shipped the notebook with Windows Xp or Windows 7. Witch one is the best for my use?

 

windows xp doesn;t support a modern browser but not that that matters as theres no reason to use this machine as the cpu is absurdly slow 

[jaslion]

6 minutes ago, FRARICHY said:

Even if I install ChromeOS?

 

Yes it literally does not have the power or needed video acceleration to play modern day streaming content. It will not work or when it does it can do at best 360p video.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

2 minutes ago, FRARICHY said:

Asus shipped the notebook with Windows Xp or Windows 7. Witch one is the best for my use?

 

Windows 7

 

Youll need to run tron script to debloat windows 7

 

And youll need an ocing tutorial for eee laptops on youtube along with setfsb to overclock your laptop

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, FRARICHY said:

Asus shipped the notebook with Windows Xp or Windows 7. Witch one is the best for my use?

 

Neither this machine is just not capable. Xp does not have any browser that is modern enough and 7 is out of support.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

2 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Neither this machine is just not capable. Xp does not have any browser that is modern enough and 7 is out of support.

They are both out of support ffs and op doesnt give a crap about gaming on  such a pos unless op talking about cs 1.6, did that on my atom laptop but ran at like 25 fps and i kept losing to the bots xD

[jaslion]

Just now, Somerandomtechyboi said:

They are both out of support ffs and op doesnt give a crap about gaming on  such a pos unless op talking about cs 1.6, did that on my atom laptop but ran at like 25 fps and i kept losing to the bots xD

No?

 

They are talking about STREAMING CONTENT. This thing literally does NOT have the HARDWARE TO DO IT.

[emosun]

6 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

And youll need an ocing tutorial for eee laptops on youtube along with setfsb to overclock your laptop

if they overclocked the laptop to 10x the speed it would be equal to a 7$ cpu......

I don't think you're aware of how slow this machine actually is. This laptop won't run most 3d games regardless of age. Even playing back local video at the systems native res would be a struggle on this machine.

it's more on the level of an early raspberry pie

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Just now, emosun said:

if they overclocked the laptop to 10x the speed it would be equal to a 7$ cpu......

I don't think you're aware of how slow this machine actually is. This laptop won't run most 3d games regardless of age. Even playing back local video at the systems native res would be a struggle on this machine.

it's more on the level of an early raspberry pie

Its not completely useless, maybe for a backup backup system, so if your backup system fails youll have a backup backup system that can atleast edit documents and do very basic work, and ocing it will speed it up slightly

 

Otherwise just buy an optiplex 380, oc that via setfsb, and youll have something thats more than enough for streaming, i think there are phdgd drivers for g41 igpu so maybe install those and get abit more performance

[jaslion]

Just now, emosun said:

if they overclocked the laptop to 10x the speed it would be equal to a 7$ cpu......

I don't think you're aware of how slow this machine actually is. This laptop won't run most 3d games regardless of age. Even playing back local video at the systems native res would be a struggle on this machine.

it's more on the level of an early raspberry pie

To put it into perspective.

 

My ANCIENT pentium 3 1.2ghz has about the same power as this cpu has.

 

That thing is 21 years old and cannot do anything on the modern web.

 

We are using a atom n550 here at work as a basic navision machine (basically bussiness aplication in excel) and it SCREAMS IN AGONY trying to run it. It can BARELY EVEN LOAD A WEBSEARCH. NOT WEB PAGE BUT A WEB SEARCH. This is how bad this thing is.

 

Worse even this atom IS NOT A DUAL CORE it just has hyper threading. It is MUCH WORSE than the n550 we have here and that thing barely even functions as a pc anymore.

 

Hopefully this helps put into perspective for op and the other user how bad it is.

 

 

[jaslion]

2 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Its not completely useless, maybe for a backup backup system, so if your backup system fails youll have a backup backup system that can atleast edit documents and do very basic work, and ocing it will speed it up slightly

 

Otherwise just buy an optiplex 380, oc that via setfsb, and youll have something thats more than enough for streaming, i think there are phdgd drivers for g41 igpu so maybe install those and get abit more performance

It literally is useless it can barely if at all run office.

 

This thing has had it's time years ago now it's a paperweight and best to just sell on for a tiny bit of money.

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Its not completely useless, maybe for a backup backup system, so if your backup system fails youll have a backup backup system that can atleast edit documents and do very basic work, and ocing it will speed it up slightly

if they did a 2x overclock which isn't going to be possible it would still be too slow to stream so maybe rather than quoting me you should tell them that the system isn't capable of streaming.

[BondiBlue]

28 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Its not completely useless, maybe for a backup backup system, so if your backup system fails youll have a backup backup system that can atleast edit documents and do very basic work, and ocing it will speed it up slightly

 

Otherwise just buy an optiplex 380, oc that via setfsb, and youll have something thats more than enough for streaming, i think there are phdgd drivers for g41 igpu so maybe install those and get abit more performance

The OptiPlex 380 you're talking about is several times more powerful at stock speeds with a low end CPU than the netbook OP has. The netbook isn't entirely useless, but it's not usable for what OP wants to do. 

[dragonfly43]

Puppy, antiX.

[KarsusTG]

I would bet money it could run Tiny Core since it is targeted at 486 level hardware.  I would start there and move to Puppy Linux.  If it runs puppy well enough (and it should) then move up to AntiX.  If AntiX runs well, you might try crunchbang++, but this is about as far as that hardware would take you.  You might maybe get peppermint (kinda like ubuntu based chrome os) to run well enough, but that is a big maybe.  You certainly wont get modern chrome to run on that hardware worth a dang.  

 

I agree with everyone else here though.  Daily life will be a struggle for that processor.  

[kelvinhall05]

Super minimal Arch install would be your best bet I think, but unless it either has an SSD or you have one lying around you can throw in it, I wouldn't bother, and I certainly wouldn't buy one just for this machine.

[Waweic]

I daily drove a machine like that for a few years, not so long ago. I would install arch and sway, I have yet to find a machine which can't run that. Web browsing will be a shit experience, I can tell you that. The only way for you to be watching videos on that thing is probably transcoding them beforehand on another machine. The streaming services you mentioned probably won't run well, if at all. You could transcode the videos (and reduce the resolution) and it might be able to play them back.

Even the oldest raspberry pi (which is really slow nowadays) has built in h264 hardware decoding. You could have a look at Pine64, they build pretty nice boards for not too much money