which windows version

englishpremier · 30 Oct 2008 at 13:34

My ex has an old Celeron 700Mhz system with around 300+ MB ram.

It is currently running XP SP2 and as you can imagine is dog slow.

I thought that the old celerons (pre P4) were basically only a tad slower than the equivelent P3.

I used to have an old P3 500 MHZ lying around and it played dixv encoded and flash video fine so I was supprised when the Celeron couldn't.

Even running chrome or firefox uses almost 100% cpu.

What OS and other software would you recommend to get this working as a web browsing machine?

bledd · 30 Oct 2008 at 13:36

nlite + xp sp3, don't install ie7, disable system restore, disable automatic updates (it rapes the system when doing the scan), don't install AV

or some linux ?

englishpremier · 30 Oct 2008 at 14:29

what else is safe to remove using nlite?

The pc will be behind a router but will be connecting wirelessly.

All it really needs to do is to be able to browse the internet at a decent rate, as i said at present it uses 100% cpu.

Might windows 2000 be worth it? or does it need the same resources as XP?

Royal Fleet · 30 Oct 2008 at 14:32

bledd. said:
or some linux ?

What I would say. Try Ubuntu, you can run from a CD without installing to see what you think.

You should be able to use then as a web machine and stick open Office on as well for word proc, spreadsheet etc

englishpremier · 30 Oct 2008 at 15:52

Royal Fleet said:
What I would say. Try Ubuntu, you can run from a CD without installing to see what you think.

You should be able to use then as a web machine and stick open Office on as well for word proc, spreadsheet etc

I use Ubuntu as is on my main PC which she has an account on.

I thought Gnome/Kde might be more resource hungry than Windows though.

Royal Fleet · 30 Oct 2008 at 16:03

I had Ubuntu running on an old laptop, just didn't use any of the 3d stuff. Was a lot quicker than XP.

englishpremier · 30 Oct 2008 at 16:04

cool. I've only got he 64-bit version so will down load the regular and give it a try.

Just incase anyone is wondering i'll post back here with the results.

alex24 · 30 Oct 2008 at 16:19

Could always try xubuntu once you've downloaded it or just get the xubuntu iso. Thats designed to work better on low mem slower systems.

Tony Williams · 30 Oct 2008 at 17:07

I have a 2.4Ghz Celeron and it runs frigging crappy I also have a P3 500Mhz that isn't much slower. If you want Windows which you asked for I would use something like NT4 or 2000.

If it's Linux maybe something that's damn small like: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Look into: Elive, Xubuntu, Fluxbox, Puppy Linux.

I mean at the end of the day if your not using the PC fulltime and you just wanna BROWSE the interwebs and maybe the odd MP3, then Linux makes sense, it's free for starters so rather than buy a used copy or whatever, you could get Linux free (or real cheap). You'll be mostly on Firefox so the O/S shouldn't matter as you wont be faffing around (if your a newcomer that is)