OS for very old laptop but make it functional?

[frozensun]

Hi guys.

I have this Asus Transformer laptop model T100TAF which was kinda special gift to me few years ago.

It is running painfully slow with Atom processor and 1GB of RAM even with one Chrome tab opened (default Windows 8/8.1).

Is there some other OS to install,which would make it work much more responsive?

I'd only use it for light browsing the web.

Thanks.

[Levent]

Anything with an Atom processor of that era is hard to use nowadays. Especially with ram constraints.

[frozensun]

8 minutes ago, Levent said:

Anything with an Atom processor of that era is hard to use nowadays. Especially with ram constraints.

I'm sure it would run some light LInux distro fine.

[Levent]

Just now, frozensun said:

I'm sure it would run some light LInux distro fine.

Sure, but I wouldnt expect it to be magically snappier.

[frozensun]

3 minutes ago, Levent said:

Sure, but I wouldnt expect it to be magically snappier.

So which distro?

[Eigenvektor]

5 minutes ago, frozensun said:

So which distro?

Distro shouldn't matter much, just make sure to pick a lightweight desktop environment like Xfce or LXDE.

[Radium_Angel]

6 minutes ago, frozensun said:

So which distro?

I like Crunchbang plus plus. The UI is very light on resources (and it's still debian based so easy to pick up)

[Needfuldoer]

15 minutes ago, frozensun said:

So which distro?

You could try something like Lubuntu or Puppy Linux, but that thing is still going to struggle (especially since you can't add RAM to it). Chrome/Firefox/etc isn't magically "lighter" just because it's on Linux. Bay Trail netbooks were slow when they were new, and that was almost a decade ago.

 

https://lubuntu.me/

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/

 

There's a lot of folklore that Linux can "breathe new life into" old computers, and that's only kind of true. They're still old computers, and if you expect to run modern software on them you'll have to temper your expectations no matter what.

[YEET_Master86]

7 hours ago, frozensun said:

So which distro?

well, I was able to get an old inspiron mini from... well, older than I am running on Raspberry pi os. it is quick on anything I put it on. just make sure you download raspberry pi desktop. Hope this helps!

[RollyShed]

8 hours ago, frozensun said:

I have this Asus Transformer laptop model T100TAF....Is there some other OS to install,which would make it work much more responsive?

I'd only use it for light browsing the web.Thanks.

It, the T100TAF, is 64 bit but needs a 32 bit installer, basically a "fiddle factor" so it isn't as easy to do an installation as it could be. The T200 is simple to do an installation on and I have one of those with Linux Mint Cinnamon on it.

 

So basically, a warning, things might not be as straight forward as they should be.

[frozensun]

15 hours ago, RollyShed said:

It, the T100TAF, is 64 bit but needs a 32 bit installer, basically a "fiddle factor" so it isn't as easy to do an installation as it could be. The T200 is simple to do an installation on and I have one of those with Linux Mint Cinnamon on it.

 

So basically, a warning, things might not be as straight forward as they should be.

What you mean needs 32bit installer,why 32 bit?

[PurpleBaboon]

The generation of atom processor in this device is incredibly stupid for more reasons than your average atom processor, the chip is 64bit but the firmware it uses is 32bit and does not have a legacy bios emulation layer. This means that you need a 32 bit boot loader for your 64bit OS, The only Linux that I know for sure that will support this setup is fedora but that comes gnome by default and is quite heavy in general so would eat your ram at the blink of an eye. For this setup you will want something light and xfce based but you will probably need to inject the 32 bit grub efi file manually to get it to boot. Linux mint xfce is a good choice, I've linked a forum thread where someone is doing just that to get it to run on a similar atom chip.

 

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=345217

[frozensun]

18 hours ago, PurpleBaboon said:

The generation of atom processor in this device is incredibly stupid for more reasons than your average atom processor, the chip is 64bit but the firmware it uses is 32bit and does not have a legacy bios emulation layer. This means that you need a 32 bit boot loader for your 64bit OS, The only Linux that I know for sure that will support this setup is fedora but that comes gnome by default and is quite heavy in general so would eat your ram at the blink of an eye. For this setup you will want something light and xfce based but you will probably need to inject the 32 bit grub efi file manually to get it to boot. Linux mint xfce is a good choice, I've linked a forum thread where someone is doing just that to get it to run on a similar atom chip.

 

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=345217

Thank you.

Looks like very complicated.

Will it make laptop run smoother and more responsive?

[PurpleBaboon]

38 minutes ago, frozensun said:

Thank you.

Looks like very complicated.

Will it make laptop run smoother and more responsive?

It's not that bad, essentially you have to make the installer as you normally would and then download an extra file and move it into a specific location on your installer drive as well as the internal drive after you've installed it.

 

Yes it will make it smoother and more responsive but one gigabyte of ram is still one gigabyte of ram and chrome is still chrome, it will still be slow even if slightly less so.

[scraft162]

On 12/19/2022 at 5:49 PM, frozensun said:

Hi guys.

I have this Asus Transformer laptop model T100TAF which was kinda special gift to me few years ago.

It is running painfully slow with Atom processor and 1GB of RAM even with one Chrome tab opened (default Windows 8/8.1).

Is there some other OS to install,which would make it work much more responsive?

I'd only use it for light browsing the web.

Thanks.

archlinux?

[sailsman63]

18 hours ago, scraft162 said:

archlinux?

Arch will run on practically anything. I would not recommend it if you're a total Linux newbie, however. It's pointed specifically at tinkerers and people who find learning the arcane internals of system administration fun.

 

I say this as someone who uses Arch as my daily driver, and did not migrate from another distro. I had done multiple VMs to experiment with before installing for real, and I still ran into hiccups. It's the way to go if you think that the proper way to start the installation process is by setting up your drives with command line formatting tools.

[scraft162]

10 hours ago, sailsman63 said:

Arch will run on practically anything. I would not recommend it if you're a total Linux newbie, however. It's pointed specifically at tinkerers and people who find learning the arcane internals of system administration fun.

 

I say this as someone who uses Arch as my daily driver, and did not migrate from another distro. I had done multiple VMs to experiment with before installing for real, and I still ran into hiccups. It's the way to go if you think that the proper way to start the installation process is by setting up your drives with command line formatting tools.

true

[Scorpion_3381]

i would personally use cromeOS FLEX

i have sevrall old laptops and they are the same and i tryed linux mint Xfce and chromeOS FLEX and the FLEX was way faster.....so you decide.

[Norrels]

On 12/20/2022 at 7:34 PM, PurpleBaboon said:

The generation of atom processor in this device is incredibly stupid for more reasons than your average atom processor, the chip is 64bit but the firmware it uses is 32bit and does not have a legacy bios emulation layer. This means that you need a 32 bit boot loader for your 64bit OS, The only Linux that I know for sure that will support this setup is fedora but that comes gnome by default and is quite heavy in general so would eat your ram at the blink of an eye. For this setup you will want something light and xfce based but you will probably need to inject the 32 bit grub efi file manually to get it to boot. Linux mint xfce is a good choice, I've linked a forum thread where someone is doing just that to get it to run on a similar atom chip.

 

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=345217

Actually there is one dude who makes spins of Ubuntu and Lubuntu for these.

 

https://linuxiumcomau.blogspot.com/

 

It has been a while but if I remember correctly, no newer than 20.04 goes for that old CPU, had pretty much the same in first Intel Compute stick.

Newer OS spins there were meant for newer Atoms, Z8300- or whatever it was. Anyway, it has other info on subject if someone is really willing to play with those things.

Compute stick has 2GB RAM and same Z3735 CPU and it's on the edge of any kind of usability with that old Lubuntu 20.04LTS. It has support until April.

 

For OP, yes, opening menus is fast enough, sure, but no matter even if you stick some KolibriOS or RTOS made in Assembly which weights couple megabytes (not actually very realistic) like it has been mentioned for many times, it only helps if all you do is click on menus and open notepads and so on.

Web browsing, Youtube and so on will still be total pain no matter what OS is there.

 

And realistically there isn't that much difference between mainline Linux distros, it's the graphical enviroment that makes the difference and you can install any of those in any distro. Yes, there are several very lightweight distros which have their own problems, especially when you have specialized hardware. Some work better, some worse. Q4OS and Puppy are some of these. Or you might as well just use outdated OS if want OS to be snappy and use it for notepad or whatever.

 

Oh and almost forgot, ditch resource hog Chrome if you want to use web, don't even think about such heavyweights.

[frozensun]

Thought to install ChromeOS Flex but it only supports 64 bit CPU...

[daedulus]

if you want to run a 64bit linux kernel on a 32bit UEFI, you'll need a kernel with CONFIG_EFI_MIXED enabled and a bootloader that can do the 32bit->64bit handover such as grub2.

 

the reason for why 32bit UEFI was used on those devices despite being a 64bit CPU, was due to 64bit windows not fitting/performing well on the low spec devices. so 32bit windows was rolled out and due to the need for UEFI must match kernel bit width it stuck. 

depending on what distro you'll want to roll they'll have different ways to build the kernel/bootloader or may support the scenario already, so reading the dev docs will be necessary. 

it's not impossible but it does introduce a burden on having to maintain the bootloader/kernel, so if you aren't comfortable with automating kernel builds/bootloader installs, I'd recommend sticking with a 32bit distro.

[LanerJ]

On 1/15/2023 at 7:06 AM, frozensun said:

Thought to install ChromeOS Flex but it only supports 64 bit CPU...

One linux distro that I really like is Anti-X. I just used their full ver on an old Athlon 64 machine with 512mb SDRAM and it was actually quite snappy. It uses a SUPER light WM (IceWM) and is just generally made to be as light as possible while still being not terrible to use. But of course that's all if you want to use a version of Linux, otherwise you could just try debloating and optimizing Windows 10 by removing visual effects, using a debloater program, etc.

[daedulus]

Antix is pretty decent, but they are extremely politically biased and that can potentially be a liability down the track if one of the maintainers pulls an activist stunt down the road like what has happened a couple of times in nodejs land with developers intentionally introducing harmful code to hurt their perceived enemies.

[LanerJ]

Lol I know FOR REAL. I was telling one of my professors to check it out (he was looking for a light distro as well) and I forgot about all the political stuff on there lol. I think for the most part it's safe tho because their main mission is making a light system for everyone to be able to compute. IDK if someone already mentioned, but is Puppy Linux still a thing? I feel like that would work well also.

[frozensun]

On 1/21/2023 at 6:49 PM, LanerJ said:

One linux distro that I really like is Anti-X. I just used their full ver on an old Athlon 64 machine with 512mb SDRAM and it was actually quite snappy. It uses a SUPER light WM (IceWM) and is just generally made to be as light as possible while still being not terrible to use. But of course that's all if you want to use a version of Linux, otherwise you could just try debloating and optimizing Windows 10 by removing visual effects, using a debloater program, etc.

Hmmm.Interesting.

Could try that one?

Easy to install and configure and if needed install aditional packages/repositories?

I would just use this laptop for light browsing and watching yt vids.

I don't think no W10 version would run decent on 1GB of RAM,probably W7 would run okayish but W7 is not for touch input.

Even on W8 with one Chrome tab opened I only have around 200MB of RAM free,imagine on W10...

I could give a chance to that linux distro,thx for info...will think about it.