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Win 7 on ancient laptop?

hfxmike

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I want to give an Acer 4000 to a friend of mine.

It has a AMD Turion 64 ML-37 CPU (single core) and x700 graphics. 2 GB ram.


It already has windows 7 on it, but basic web stuff - Facebook, Youtube, forget it.
I've already turned off all the eye-candy and background/startup processes (as much as possible)....but no real change. It's only good for Soliltaire and Wordpad.


I don't have a lot of time to pour into this thing - and zero money. Would an old version of Chrome or FireFox significantly lighten the demands on the system? All up-to-date browsers want WAY more than this old "Ferrari" can provide. Or should I go back to XP/Vista in addition to older versions of programs.


As a last resort, I might install a very light linux distro on it. (What's the best for this hardware? Puppy?)


I'd really like to stick with something she knows (Windows), but I don't know if a 10 year old version of firefox would make Youtube/Facebook usable. I couldn't stream 360p over ethernet on it.)


Any advice welcome!
 

Bond007

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Normally I say older hardware can find a use, but that is too far gone. Recycle it.
 

Izerous

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After screwing around with trying to get some of the lightweight distro's working as intended on a old intel atom i found laying around it ended up in the scrap bin along with some other stuff destined for the eco-center. I'd personally bin that thing in the exact same spot.
 

djbrad

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You could try linuxmint xfce. My wife ran it on it's celeron coresolo laptop for a year or two. It was ok.
 

Lysrin

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My suggestion would have been a lightweight Linux distribution as mentioned by djbrad. At least that is something to try that costs you nothing but a bit of time. And xfce or similar desktop environments are close enough to Windows not to be too steep a learning curve for a Windows-only user. If you are interested in trying that route there are a lot of good options. This article can help you out and shows you how similar to Windows they are: 10 best lightweight Linux distros.

But, beyond that I have to agree with others. That hardware is tough to breath new life into.
 

hfxmike

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I think I'll install Peppermint linux on it this weekend. Might make it usable....for something.
 

Lysrin

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Certainly worth a shot! Like I said, you're not losing anything, just the time it takes to do the install/setup.
 

Shadowmeph

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yes lightweight linux distros will work also turn off anything that yoiu wont be using . its to bad that XP or 98 were not arounbd I used to run a totally stripped down winxp for years it had very few things running in the back ground worked great for simple things I could even play the old Nonscientific enemy territory on it it only had 500mb ram lol.
if you search around I think that you might be able to find a way to totally strip down win7 I knew a guy that made a version of win7 and put it on a usb stick so that he could just plug it into most pcs ad a mobile os it was a little slow but It saved myu but a few times when I broke my OS wa sable to use it to fix them
 

hfxmike

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Halifax
Might look for that super stripped down Win 7. I've installed puppy linux and linux lite on other people's netbooks. What I am wondering now is, what hardware requirements are needed to stream 360p or 480p youtube vids. Given a fast internet connection. hmmm

I guess it's a combination of the hardware and the whatever OS and browser, etc are using.
Mike
 

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