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Lightest weight OS available

Samwell

So my dad has this ancient laptop that was sitting in his work cupboard for many many years. It's a Toshiba Tecra 8000. As it was made around 1998, it ran Windows 98. With that OS coming on 20 years old, it's pretty obvious that it isn't well supported and hasn't been for a long time. Therefor I was wondering if anyone knew of any extremely lightweight operating systems to put on this bad boy? All I really want it to do is browse the web capably and edit MS work documents (don't mind which word processor it uses, as long as it's compatible). The specs on this Goliath, it has a Pentium II (I think it's running at a whopping 350Mhz but Windows XP reports 199Mhz), it has the upgraded RAM option so it has a whopping 128MB of RAM. The HDD is a huge 6GB large (yeah, you can keep your SSD's!!). Don't know if this will work but the way I get internet on it is a PCMCIA card. Obviously if the OS doesn't support them then it's going to be useless. And incase anyone was wondering, the battery lasts about 12 seconds. (Yes, 12 seconds). I'm doing this for sh!ts and giggles so throw any options you can think of this way please!!

CPU: 8320, GPU: 7870 Myst, Motherboard: Asrock 970 extreme3, PSU: XFX Pro 650W, RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz, Case: Zalman Z11

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xubuntu is pretty light

I spent $2500 on building my PC and all i do with it is play no games atm & watch anime at 1080p(finally) watch YT and write essays...  nothing, it just sits there collecting dust...

Builds:

The Toaster Project! Northern Bee!

 

The original LAN PC build log! (Old, dead and replaced by The Toaster Project & 5.0)

Spoiler

"Here is some advice that might have gotten lost somewhere along the way in your life. 

 

#1. Treat others as you would like to be treated.

#2. It's best to keep your mouth shut; and appear to be stupid, rather than open it and remove all doubt.

#3. There is nothing "wrong" with being wrong. Learning from a mistake can be more valuable than not making one in the first place.

 

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1 minute ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

Windows Vista is the lightest of dem all

Vista Basic (the absolute lowest version you can get) requires an 800Mhz processor and 512MB of RAM

CPU: 8320, GPU: 7870 Myst, Motherboard: Asrock 970 extreme3, PSU: XFX Pro 650W, RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz, Case: Zalman Z11

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Just now, Samwell said:

Vista Basic (the absolute lowest version you can get) requires an 800Mhz processor and 512MB of RAM

I was kidding ^^

Maybe some Linux OS

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Just now, The Belgian Waffle said:

I was kidding ^^

Maybe some Linux OS

Ah ok lol

 

Yeah I was thinking it'd be some form of Linux but there are soooo many

CPU: 8320, GPU: 7870 Myst, Motherboard: Asrock 970 extreme3, PSU: XFX Pro 650W, RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz, Case: Zalman Z11

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Older notebooks are much harder to run anything other than Windows due to certain hardware combos and Pentium II if I recall gets very shaky in the driver front past Windows XP.

 

TinyCore & Alpine Linux are my two faves for older hardware as they use under ~200MB of RAM once you load custom drivers if necessary.  I use TinyCore on an Intel Atom 230 B|

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Just now, Dan Castellaneta said:

Windows 98 is probably your best bet if you want something even remotely functional.

That's what I was fearing. If that is the case, anyone know of any EXTREMELY light weight web browsers? I like my chrome but considering a single tab would take more than all of the RAM in the computer it doesn't seem very viable... Also chrome doesn't install on 98

CPU: 8320, GPU: 7870 Myst, Motherboard: Asrock 970 extreme3, PSU: XFX Pro 650W, RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz, Case: Zalman Z11

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have a look at Slax OS, seemed better than Tiny Core on the UI side. 

| Intel i5 4670k @ 4.3GHz | XFX RX 480 8 GB | Asus Z87i-Pro | 8.0 GB Kinston DDR3 | Samsung Evo 120GB SSD |

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Xbuntu or Lubuntu are the first that come to mind for me. I would definitely recommend one of those if you are not very Linux-savvy already, as Ubuntu is the most user-friendly (imho) Linux distro ATM.

When in doubt, re-format.

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13 hours ago, Samwell said:

That's what I was fearing. If that is the case, anyone know of any EXTREMELY light weight web browsers? I like my chrome but considering a single tab would take more than all of the RAM in the computer it doesn't seem very viable... Also chrome doesn't install on 98

I had a good experience resurrecting a laptop with Lubuntu, although it wasn't as old (celeron something on the 468 socket, 512MB ram, originally shipped with XP). But if you have no choice other than returning to Windows 98 era, I would recommend using Windows 2000 instead. It is what saved me from periodic fresh installs at the time (it's NT based, as XP eventually was, since the 95-98 lineage was unfixable :P). Or you may even try your luck with XP.

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Linux Mint Xfce 32bit

Black Knight-

Ryzen 5 5600, GIGABYTE B550M DS3H, 16Gb Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000mhz, Asrock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming,

Seasonic Focus GM 750, Samsung EVO 860 EVO SSD M.2, Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe, Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon

 

Daughter's Rig;

MSI B450 A Pro, Ryzen 5 3600x, 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000mhz, Silicon Power A55 512GB SSD, Gigabyte RX 5700 Gaming OC, Corsair CX430

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Damn Small Linux. Last I knew you only needed a few hundred megabytes for it to even run. 

I just want to sit back and watch the world burn. 

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