Will a lite OS solve this?

claptonman

claptonman

New Member
So I have a laptop that I use for internet at my job (security) and its not playing streaming videos very well. Laggy and unwatchable. Youtube at 360 is fine, but other websites, not so much. Of course I know its outdated, but all I do on it is internet.

Dell Inspiron 2650
Intel Pentium 4 M 1.6ghz
512 mb of RAM
XP home

Yeah, its pretty slow.

Would a different OS be better, like ubuntu or Google OS? (Not even sure google OS is out) Because it would use less resources running the OS and more on the internet. What do you guys think?
 
depends on what sites your using to run the video and stuff. A xfde or KDE based linux os will run faster on that, but you wont be able to use anything that doesnt support moonlight (such as Netflix), even though moonlight and silverlight are the same damn program.

anyway, answer, it could. More ram will definitely help if that is possible. Your CPU is slow (literally) and inefficient, so that could be the cause of your issue. I cant run netflix on my work laptop with a P4m 2.53 and 768MB of DDR266, so yours is having a simular problem there.
 
Already looked if I can add more RAM, but I cannot. Mostly I just stumbleupon all night and most videos from there do not work. Don't use netflix at all. I have been in a dry spell when it comes to messing with a computer, so I may install ubunto just for fun.
 
no way on Ubuntu. Its nearly as heavy, if not heavier than 7 at this point. I would not suggest it with any single core, and less than 3 GB or ram. Thats about the min for running it at a usable level.

http://www.kubuntu.org/ Lighter KDE version of Ubuntu. Good for old computers and netbooks.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/ known to suffer little from a P3-500 and 64MB ram on a rage pro GPU.

Mint also ships in a KDE version. Lite and easier to ;earn than Ubuntu.
 
Why not burn Puppy 5.2.8 to a CD, find a USB stick on which to store your personalized config files and use it to surf the net? Your hard drive could become your storage (for example, just format the whole thing to ext2), then you would not need the USB stick..

I think this could work well for you.

Best wishes!

EDIT: to add a swap file, which will help in your lack of RAM, see one of my favorite sites here
or for puppy, see here or even better, here

pane-free
 
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Both Gnome, Unity, and KDE are all "heavy load" window managers/desktop environments. If you want something light, check out anything with xfce,lxde, openbox, awesome,scrotwm,etc. Distro wise, crunchbang or peppermint.
 
Lubuntu is a excellent choice, most of the compatibility of Ubuntu but extremely lite. I had a netbook with the 1.6 Ghz 1st gen Atom and 2 GB of DDR2 memory and it would boot any were from 10 to 15 seconds it was so lite.
 
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