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@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    6 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@leminal.spaceEnglish
    1·
    6 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.

  • RustyHeater@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 months ago

    I have that exact machine in my electronics “graveyard”.

    Peppermint OS was my GO-TO for speed and driver support out of the box. You can also stick in a 2GB SODIMM of ram. It will only recognize 1.5GB but still 50% more ram.

  • thayer@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    6 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…