Right OS for old Laptop

Hello!
I have an old laptop that has pretty bad specs:

Dell Latitude D600
Pentium M @ 1.6 GHz
1GB RAM
20 GB Hard Drive
32MB Graphics Card

and I would like to know what version of Windows, or even any OS, that would work well on it. It is planned to just be used for basic online shopping. No games or anything like that. Here are some OSes that I believe will fit my needs:

Windows 2000 SP4 - Not tried, but seems favorable due to small size.
Windows XP SP3 - Runs a bit slow with only a few programs.
Windows Vista RTM - Runs at the same speed as Windows XP SP3 but is very slow at opening Windows apps like Control Panel or Windows Explorer.
Windows Vista SP1 - Runs extremely slow with no programs at all.
Windows 7 - Runs fair, but not that fast.
Windows 8 - Does not even load due to no PAE/NX Support.
Windows 8.1 - Does not even load due to no PAE/NX Support.
Ubuntu - Does not load due to no PAE/NX Support.
Most Linux versions - Does not load due to no PAE/NX Support.

The only requirement is that it should boot up fast and should be able to have a recent secure browser (Chrome 32 / Firefox) be able to run on it. For Windows 2k, I heard about some workarounds, so I'm keeping that in the pool. (Unofficial Service Pack 5 for MS Windows 2000)

Thanks for your help,
Matthew (LCT01a)

find yourself a used laptop on craigs or e bay part that one off

andrew129260 said:

Try zorin or mint linix on it. Or dsl

Any Linux distributions based off of Ubuntu are not compatible with the computer. DSL might work, but it need a bit more powerful of an OS.

imjeffd said:

find yourself a used laptop on craigs or e bay part that one off

This computer is a very old secondary computer for basic tasks. As I said, buying items and probably looking stuff up on the dictionary.

ICit2lol said:

imjeffd said:

find yourself a used laptop on craigs or e bay part that one off

The other one that I personally like is Ubuntu but whatever you use it is going to be VERY slow

Ubuntu doesn't load due to PAE support.

bigmck said:

I have that laptop. I bought it refurbished for about $100. It came with Win XP. It was pretty slow then. I tried Win 7 on it and was about the same, slow. I used it for a while but gave up on it. It is sitting in my closet now and will probably never be used again. I don't think there is an OS that will run on it to please you. It is just slow.

That makes perfect sense to do that. It's a very slow machine even with XP.

Matthew do you have the means to up the ante on the RAM and the hard driveespecially as that drive is VERY small for 7 which is also the pick of what youhave posted.


If it is possible you need at least 2GB RAM and themotherboard will support only that amount anyway it and a minimum of say an 80GB drive because I amguessing here it is one of the older PATA drives already in the machine so itis pointless suggesting anything like an SSD.

The memory by the way is the very old now - DDR1 and is sometimes hard to come by in large capacity sticks and can be quite expensive.

Personally if your budget could run to a machine that runs slightly higher specs you would be better off doing that because you are looking at throwing good money after bad given the age of that machine - sorry mate for the brutal truth.

Yes, I see that it is very old. I don't feel like upgrading anything because it's just going to be used for 10 minute tasks when other computers are not available.

Britton30 said:

Other than the very aged CPU, the hard drive is probably a 5400RPM and they just crawl with anything installed. You can get a 64GB SSD in the $50-$60 range, if the laptop would support it, it may have only IDE connector.

Yeah, an old IDE PATA.
For what I see here, Windows 2000 seems to be the only choice remaining.

I found out that the hard drive is a 4200 RPM drive, which is even worse. Could buying a new 7200 RPM IDE HDD be good?