I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
- Eugenia ( @eugenia@lemmy.ml ) English21•2 months ago
You need something like DamnSmallLinux, not Debian. Debian users about 800 MB of RAM with XFce, on a clean boot. It requires a minimum of 2 GB with a modern browser (one tab, 4+ GB with more tabs). DamnSmallLinux uses about 128 MB RAM on a clean boot, and with the Netfront browser about half a gig. Definitely better for such a laptop than any modern distro.
- Handles ( @halm@leminal.space ) English18•2 months ago
Maybe try Openbox instead of XFCE. Can’t promise it’ll add much memory but with 1gb RAM I guess every bit counts?
Edit: just had a quick look around, and it looks like your machine can be upgraded to a whopping 2gb RAM… It’s still not great, but it is a 100% increase in memory.
Edit 2: I’m not actually recommending you buy RAM from memorystock.com, it just turned up at the top of my search results. The page should give you the type and version you’ll need to look for, though.
- Trainguyrom ( @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ) English2•2 months ago
I once swapped a Debian install with XFCE to just running Openbox instead of a full DE and got down to 300Mb or so of memory usage. This was about a decade ago so obviously YMMV but given literally all I did was run Debian with just openbox and no DE, there’s probably additional tuning to be done that can get them to a more usable state
- Shawdow194 ( @Shawdow194@kbin.run ) 11•2 months ago
SSD upgrade
- Omega_Jimes ( @Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca ) 5•2 months ago
This will be the single biggest change you can make. Swapping an hdd for a cheap 256gb ssd will make a bigger difference than any DE changes.
- boredsquirrel ( @boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net ) 5•2 months ago
And then ZRAM and swap like hell
- ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months ago
Won’t that kill the SSD on short notice? Or can they make do with it for years?
- boredsquirrel ( @boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net ) 1•2 months ago
I mean, worth the tradeoff? Zram would just make the cpu work more. Swap… kill the ssd
But over time. SSDs can handle a lot, like a couple of years?
- DaPorkchop_ ( @DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml ) 2•2 months ago
Won’t be a couple of years if you’re constantly swapping, no.
- ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months ago
Not really, if you would spend a lot more on SDD drives instead of getting a modern computer
- boredsquirrel ( @boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net ) 1•2 months ago
Do you have numbers? I dont think its that dramatic
- GolfNovemberUniform ( @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml ) 9•2 months ago
JWM is my suggestion. It’s a floating window manager (not tiling) that doesn’t require almost any knowledge or key bindings to use and it has all necessary stuff included out of the box afaik. You can also use xdgmenumaker to make the right click/Start menu better.
- Noo ( @Navigator@jlai.lu ) 8•2 months ago
Try puppy linux ?
- GolfNovemberUniform ( @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml ) 2•2 months ago
It’s a bit on the complicated side but still a good distro.
- thayer ( @thayer@lemmy.ca ) English8•2 months ago
If that’s one of those old 10" netbooks, I had good experiences running dwm and xmonad on mine back in the day (had an Acer and later an MSI Wind U120(?)). Typically ran all my apps maximized, one per desktop. Firefox did okay, but this was around 2010-2012. Mostly stuck with terminal apps and it was more than snappy enough.
Some screenshots from days past…
- jagermo ( @jagermo@feddit.org ) 4•2 months ago
Ohhh, the MSI Wind. One of my favorite devices, so much value for money. Loved it
- thayer ( @thayer@lemmy.ca ) English3•2 months ago
Me too! I can’t recall now why I parted with it, but I wish I hadn’t. Would love to see what it could do today.
- jagermo ( @jagermo@feddit.org ) 1•2 months ago
RAM broke and was soldered in :(
- eldavi ( @eldavi@lemmy.ml ) 6•2 months ago
either you go the easy route and use a distribution targeted towards low spec systems like damn small linux or you go the difficult route and implement the same measures that they implement onto your debian installation.
last time i was in your situation i ended up doing both and i’m glad i did because my version of the build never worked as well as the custom distro.
- bloodfart ( @bloodfart@lemmy.ml ) 6•2 months ago
Oh yeah, I completely forgot, that laptops real old, so go ahead and regrease the cpu.
- TwinTusks ( @TwinTusks@bitforged.space ) English2•2 months ago
I have two roughly 10 years old laptop that is completely usable, how do I go about regreasing the cpu (M14x r2 & A1502)?
- bloodfart ( @bloodfart@lemmy.ml ) 3•2 months ago
Locate the service manuals or some kind of tear down. Confirm that the process will be within your capability. Order some thermal compound. Disassemble the laptop until you remove the heatsink from the cpu. Clean the old cpu and heatsink with isopropyl until it’s as clean as can possibly be. Apply new thermal compound. Reassemble laptop.
this might be the service manual for the alienware
A1502 could be a lot of laptops, use the emc number or serial to find out which one or just look for the MacBook Pro NN,n number in the about option under the Apple menu. It doesn’t matter which one you have, they’re all really easy to work on and well documented.
- bassad ( @bassad@jlai.lu ) 1•2 months ago
Check on youtube there is probably a video on how to open and do it your laptop model
- JustARegularNerd ( @JustARegularNerd@aussie.zone ) English4•2 months ago
Looking up the specs of a D270, looks like the memory is upgradable.
It also looks like the Intel Atom N2600 it has (from my reading) is actually a 64-bit processor
I’d probably say you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a bigger DDR3 memory stick for it for dirt cheap or free from an e-wasted notebook
Ultimately it depends if the performance loss you’re finding is memory limited or CPU limited right now, but I would think that giving it 2 or 4GB + giving it 64-bit would go a long way
- bloodfart ( @bloodfart@lemmy.ml ) 4•2 months ago
Compile your own kernel for those atom processors and they work much better.
It’s not hard, there’s a text interface for it where you just pick what to do from a list.
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English2•2 months ago
That will only speed it up slightly at best and at worse it will be slower
- ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months ago
I’ve never compiled my kernel so I’m not familiar with what is happening there, but why could that be faster? Is it only installing drivers for present devices, or what is happening?
- bloodfart ( @bloodfart@lemmy.ml ) 1•2 months ago
I can’t remember off the top of my head because it’s been a long while, but there’s some weird option inside the configurator that accounts for one of the things the early atom line doesn’t have that the default kernel expects out of x86 or x64 processors.
Of course, any binary program that was compiled with the expectation of that capacity would also have weird hangs and slowness, but (like I said, a while ago) that didn’t tend to cause a 1.3ghz atom to be slower than a 700mhz pentium m.
- muhyb ( @muhyb@programming.dev ) 4•2 months ago
You can try something like antiX but it won’t do good as a desktop. I use my netbook as a home server with pi-hole in it.
- ryannathans ( @ryannathans@aussie.zone ) 4•2 months ago
Zram
- slembcke ( @slembcke@lemmy.ml ) 4•2 months ago
Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It’s brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)
- Trainguyrom ( @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ) English1•2 months ago
I didn’t know Haiku had actual hardware support!
- mexicancartel ( @mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English3•2 months ago
Antix linux is a very begginer friendly distro with very light specs
- oo1 ( @oo1@lemmings.world ) English2•2 months ago
replace HDD with SSD, number one thing to do if possible.
lxde or lxqt are quite a bit lighter then xfce.
you could try tiny core linux. it really depends what programs you want to run.