Right OS for old Laptop

lct01a said:

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?

Personally ICT mate this is stepping into the realms of whether there is such a beast - I have yet to see one but I guess there might be one around but you are still going to be restricted very heavily by the CPU and especially the RAM which if you run any OS other than the older types is going to fill VERY quickly

lct01a said:

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?

It could help it a lot, but Newegg shows only one expensive one.
Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, Hard Drives, Internal Hard Drives, All Laptop Hard Drives, 7200 RPM, IDE Ultra

EDIT: Amazon has several more choices.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_p_...nid=3598629011

Britton30 said:

lct01a said:

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?

It could help it a lot, but Newegg shows only one expensive one.
Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, Hard Drives, Internal Hard Drives, All Laptop Hard Drives, 7200 RPM, IDE Ultra

EDIT: Amazon has several more choices.
Amazon.com: Laptop Hard Drives - PATA (IDE) / 2.5 Inch / 7200 RPM / Internal Hard Drives / Data Storage: Electronics

Holy cow I reckon if one were prepared to shell out that for a drive then a used machine of newer vintage would be far better - something refurbished for example.

Windows 98 second edition might be a good choice. There is a dedicated fan base that makes updated software work with it. There have even been unofficial service packs for it that work quite well. I cannot find the link to it, but it was on this forum. Searching did not reveal it though. Anyway, I have the unofficial service pack 3 for windows 98 second edition and it is working well in my VM with no issues.


EDIT:

Found it:

http://www.foolsdesign.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=65

You will then also be interested in winworld, which will allow you to download old programs and such that are no longer available.

http://winworldpc.com/

lct01a said:

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)

lct01a said:

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.


Ubuntu doesn't load due to PAE support.


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.

There is a Linux Mint Debian edition that may work. According to the system requirements of Debian, all Pentium processors work. http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Andrew129260 or anyone else -- I think I might try putting Win 98 on my Dell Lattitude D600. I even have the Original Win 98 disk. It will give me something to do. Do you think I would have a problem getting the Internet to work? What about drivers?

@bigmck

I had no problems with internet or drivers on the vm. Old versions of firefox and opera work well on it.

Thanks,