Best O/S for my laptop??

I can't decide what O/S to use for my laptop, currently it's running WinME and seems fairly stable and reliable, but because it's ME, it's doomed to break soon. I'm open to any suggestions (Any Windows/Linux OS), but it should boot to the login screen in less than 2 mins ideally (ME takes about 25 secs), and should not be too sluggish. The specs are:

Celeron 766Mhz
128mb RAM
13.3" Screen (not that it matters)
Belkin F5D7010 (It works under Slackware 10.2 so should work for any other Linux distros in theory)
10GB hard drive

 

What are the kind of things you want to do on it?

 

Well considering the amount of RAM that laptop has available, you'll have to go for a lightweight distribution.

With that in mind, i'd suggest you try out Xubuntu. It's got all the power and functionality of Ubuntu, but with the lighter XFCE window manager.

 

I'd just be surfing the internet and chatting over MSN.

Do you not think it'll be able to handle KDE? It's run Slackware before (with KDE), but it took so long to the logon screen that I gave in with it.

 

Nah, you need at least 256MB of RAM to use KDE. More so for GNOME

 

Xubuntu would be a good choice. Slackware needs quite a bit of customisation for it to be practically useful.

 

Agreed. I wouldn't recommend Slackware to Linux newbies

If you run Xubuntu and find it a little slow, you could always try the iceWM window manager. iceWM is a very lightweight, non-nonsense graphical interface. It's possible to run it on as little as a 486, 16MB of RAM

I've attached some pictures of my heavily customised iceWM + ROX Filer ubuntu desktop. This desktop runs FAST!

 

I found some sort of modified windows on the net modded by a group called eXperience, i dont know if its illigal or legal tough, i tried it, it ran super fast, and i meant like 10x faster than normal windows and out of 512mb ram, it only used about 50mb for me at startup, maybe less, and thats :good: for windows, you proberbly could use your windows xp product key if you have xp somewere.

But this modeed windows would be able to run fine on a system as with 128mb of ram as it was fairly basic, all the bloatware removed etc..


i found Mandriva linux to be super fast on my system, that would be good aswell.

 

Windows 95 or 98 would run on that laptop just fine,, I think windows 95 would run faster but not better than 98.. you coild put in a short version of 98..

 

IceWM is good for an uber-lite window manager. Its quite ugly with the default grey, but still functional. As mega pointed out, you can customise all you want.

 

95 I don't have the disc for (and i wouldn't use it even if I had them!)
98 isn't much different to ME except for stability, which doesn't seem to be an issue at the moment.

Xubuntu sounds good, but I'll have to wait until next month for my 2gig download limit to reset, .

Also, how about RedHat 8? I snapped disc 1 (but I can redownload it), I did try it once and the screen went all funny, but I'm sure it's fixable.

 

Red Hat 8.0 is an old distro, so we wouldn't recommend it.

 

I wouldn't use Windows, since the older versions of Windows which would actually run on that hardware are no longer supported by MS. No support = no more patches = worm city. I'd go with Megamaced's suggestion and try Xubuntu. If Xfce ends up being too heavy for your hardware, try installing and running the WM or IceWM desktop environments, since either has an extremely small resource footprint.

 

OK Thanks! I think I'll go with Xubuntu next month.

 

At last, HWF is managed to change your mind to ubuntu..:beer:.lol!

 

Xubuntu probably has the best implementation of XFCE over any distibution. Certainly VectorLinux and Zenwalk's XFCE weren't as fully featured.

Yeah, I think you'll like Xubuntu. It'll breath life back into your old laptop

 

Again I agree with megamaced. Additionally, I've found that the Opera web browser is much more fast & responsive on older hardware than Firefox. YMMV, but hey, they're both free, so might as well try 'em.

 

[ot]

IMO, the only thing that Firefox has over Opera is embedded Video and PDF support.[/ot]

 

I personally would try windows 2000 first. It might be a bit slow but seeing as its only for the net.... I never had understood peoples problems with Me though. Always worked great for me. That would be my second choice, or 98 of course.
What you gain with linux over windows you lose in usability in my opinion.
I love linux but ive never been able to migrate to it permantly.
All depends on how pretty you want it to be if all you want to do is surf the net. It wont be any worse if you used windows 95. Ive always thought IE is the best browser too. !!

 

I was going to counter everything you just said, but then I read the above and realised it would be pointless