Good OS for an old laptop

[Bounty]

Specifically an Armada E500 with 64MB RAM and a 700MHz PIII. It came with XP, which ran slow as molasses. Ideally I'd want a simple, all-in-one OS (ie, no NetBSD-style "install OS, start repairing everything that's broken and/or missing") that offers good hardware compatibility, a browser with Javascript, a text editor with basic markup, a media player, and the ability to easily install applications through a package manager. These are in descending order of importance.

So far I've tried NetBSD (see problems above), Debian (ugly and poor wifi) and Vector Linux Light (good, but hangs frequently). Is this pretty much the best I can hope for or is there something good-looking and light that might run well?

[Alyeska]

Win2K is a good place to start.

[General Zod]

Win2K is a good place to start.

Win2k works fairly well for laptops this old. (Alternately you could try Windows 98. I mean who needs anything else *I'm a smarmy asshole*? )

[Bounty]

Win2K is a good place to start.

I considered it, but apart from not having a copy handy, I never really did like using it. 64MB is also skirting the bare minimum needed to run it.

[DaveJB]

Why not try another tack, and upgrade the frankly tiny amount of memory it has? If you could find a decent memory upgrade (say, 256MB) I think XP would probably work fine, even with that processor. Any idea what memory the laptop uses? I'm guessing it'd be PC100 or PC133 SDRAM, which can still be found pretty cheap secondhand.

[General Zod]

Why not try another tack, and upgrade the frankly tiny amount of memory it has? If you could find a decent memory upgrade (say, 256MB) I think XP would probably work fine, even with that processor. Any idea what memory the laptop uses? I'm guessing it'd be PC100 or PC133 SDRAM, which can still be found pretty cheap secondhand.

Less than $10 off ebay.

[Bounty]

Is PC2700 DDR-333 backwards compatible with a PC100 slot? I have two sticks of that lying around doing not much at all.

[Alyeska]

Is PC2700 DDR-333 backwards compatible with a PC100 slot? I have two sticks of that lying around doing not much at all.

DDR 2 ram should always be compatible. Just make sure the laptop isn't SD memory.

[DaveJB]

PC100 (and PC133) is SD memory I'm afraid, and not compatible with any form of DDR memory. Also, laptops use SO-DIMMS as opposed to the standard DIMMS that desktops use.

[Uraniun235]

Yeah, you'll want to upgrade the RAM. 64MB is really stifling - even if you find a good OS to squeeze in there, how well will the browser and media player handle it? You'd probably wind up thrashing the hard drive a lot.

DDR 2 ram should always be compatible. Just make sure the laptop isn't SD memory.

DDR2 is not backwards compatible with DDR.; but then DDR333 wouldn't be DDR2.

Sorry Bounty, your spare sticks won't help you here.

[Alyeska]

PC100 (and PC133) is SD memory I'm afraid, and not compatible with any form of DDR memory. Also, laptops use SO-DIMMS as opposed to the standard DIMMS that desktops use.

DOH, I had forgotten that 100 and 133 was SD-DDR1 RAM. So yeah, any of the newer DDR2 stuff is completely out of the picture. Still, finding more RAM is a must. Find a nice 512mb stick of PC133 RAM for that laptop.

[Bounty]

Pending a RAM upgrade, I've installed Puppy Linux. So far, so good; apart from the weird wireless quirk of not automatically activating the profile you just set up it's been pretty fast and stable. And certainly good enough for some light browsing in the library.

[phongn]

Be very careful about RAM upgrades for SDR SDRAM systems. Such machines often have limitations on chip density, ranking, speed or outright size limitations. Some quick Googling around indicates that said machine has two SODIMM slots with a maximum of 256MB PC100 SODIMMs each. At that point you'll be able to run XP fairly well. (I ran XP on an Armada M700 with 384MB of RAM)

[Marcus Aurelius]

Be very careful about RAM upgrades for SDR SDRAM systems. Such machines often have limitations on chip density, ranking, speed or outright size limitations. Some quick Googling around indicates that said machine has two SODIMM slots with a maximum of 256MB PC100 SODIMMs each. At that point you'll be able to run XP fairly well. (I ran XP on an Armada M700 with 384MB of RAM)

Although XP will certainly run fine with 512 MiB, there is no guarantee that you will able to find two used 256 MiB SDRAM SODIMMs. They are not very common items. 384 MiB is still possible for XP, but you will get a more responsive system by running Linux or FreeBSD. That is true even with a larger amount of memory in a less than 1 GHz PIII system, unless you are willing to risk running XP without a resident virus scanner.

My personal choice for PIII level systems with at least 256 MiB memory would be Xubuntu. I have tested it in a PIII 450 with 256 MiB of memory and it run just fine without too much paging going on. It works as well as Ubuntu on the system level, but XFCE is a lot lighter than Gnome or KDE while still offering a real integrated desktop environment with a reasonable feature set. XFCE is also pretty self-explanatory to use for anyone who is not a complete computer illiterate; in fact people with just Windows experience are able to use the basic functions with minimal tutoring.