Linux on an OLD Laptop

hello everybody this is tech cut in this video what we're going to be doing is checking out some lightweight linux distributions and to help us do that i've recruited the aid of what i think is the worst laptop in the world this right here is the hp mini 110-3030nr netbook laptop and though this thing isn't technically the worst specked thing in the world there are probably laptops that are technically worse than this but this is pretty bad and the reason why i'm calling it the worst laptop in the world is my personal experience with this uh back in i believe it was 2012 or so i helped my grandmother purchase this laptop and at the time i do believe this thing was just right around the 200 range so even for more than 10 years ago or about 10 years ago it was a dirt cheap laptop now when it comes to actual specifications of this bad boy it's rocking a 1.66 gigahertz intel atom processor it's the n450 model it features a single gigabyte of ddr2 memory and as far as the video memory built into that atom processor we have a staggering 256 megabytes of vram the hard drive is a 160 gigabyte spinning disk at 5400 rpm and the screen is a 10.1 inch screen with a 1024 by 600 resolution now honestly that's not too bad what really really made this laptop suck was the operating system that they decided to put on it and that is windows 7 now windows 7 is overall a fantastic operating system but they put windows 7 starter edition on this laptop now one thing that you might notice is the processor in this laptop can handle 64-bit but windows 7 starter edition only supports 32-bit so with what little bit of cpu power we have we're not utilizing it to its fullest potential and then if we actually log into windows 7 starter edition which i still have on this laptop at the moment but first i need to pay my grandma back for sending this over to me so we're going to do that with the help of our sponsor of today's video and that sponsor is foso and their apex electronic toothbrush this thing overall is awesome if you open it up here you can see it has a metal handle which is just a better feel and quality overall compared to most other toothbrushes and the ships with two different heads one for sensitive and one that will give you a little bit deeper of a clean using this toothbrush gives you 42 000 sonic vibrations per minute depending on the cleaning mode you choose you have clean white gum care and polish and in addition to that you have three different levels of intensity that you can choose from it's low noise it has a built-in time sensor and a lot more features if you'd like to learn more go ahead and click the link down in the description one some of the things that actually make sense when it comes to the limitations is when it comes to the theming you're not going to get that kind of aero windows transparency effects but the limitations go well beyond that there is absolutely no personalization on this thing whatsoever even down to changing the background you have to have the standard windows background no matter what and when my grandma first purchased this thing it was kind of difficult to explain to her that you just spent 200 on something that you can't even change the background of additionally it's missing a whole bunch of other features that you'd expect like a multi-monitor support that's why i'm not able to use a capture card with this they make it more difficult to switch in between users you can't use it to like play dvds the actual windows media center is completely stripped of a lot of the functionality that you're going to want overall this thing is just very limiting but one thing that's kind of cool about it is if we go down here and actually open up our task manager it is pretty good on the ram utilization uh right now we are running about 360-ish megabytes of ram on the system at idle and the cpu isn't really working too hard now i'm going to go ahead and just open up internet explorer down here just to see what happens to the cpu so let's give that a click wait for it to fire up and we can see our actual cpu usage jump pretty significantly and our ram usage slightly ticked up what i'm going to do real quick is actually connect to the internet here god help me and connect to some web pages real quick so what i'm going to do is go ahead and bing something let's just look up tech hut on being and see what that does to our ram utilization and all that it's not bumping up too much and it seems to be not using too much resources actually using internet explorer but let's go ahead and throw a chromium on this thing if it's even gonna let us so the cool thing i'm uh downloading google chrome here and they still have a supported windows 7 32-bit version so that's a it's pretty nice this thing is taking absolutely forever to install all right chrome is opening it's uh not responding so we're gonna wait for it to respond before i can flip the camera back around and see show you guys the performance all right so welcome to chrome it looks like we're using at least on my end about just under 600 megabytes of our system memory let's do the dreaded task of opening another tab and see what happens there so i clicked the new tab button i didn't go up too much we're at 670 scraping almost to 700 megabytes of ram utilization we could see our cpu all over the place and actually trying to load any of these websites is just like this is a couple seconds away from being unusable on this trying to access anything on this laptop and our memory is still climbing here it's using 713 716 so we're going to be capped out on our ram pretty soon so overall this just is not an experience that i or nobody else should want out of computing so what we're going to do is fix this and we're going to do this by trying out a couple lightweight linux distributions and by better i mean more lightweight so let's jump on into it all right so here we have zorn os now based on the installation process i can already tell you that this is probably not going to be a light enough linux distribution for this laptop the thing with zorn light is it's right in the middle of something lightweight and a normal linux distribution i would argue that the best use case for this if you're somewhere in between the two to four gigabyte range when it comes to how much ram your system has so with that said i'm going to go ahead and connect to some wi-fi real quick now the main version of zorn uses known but this light version uses xfce so it is going to run a little bit better now the first thing i'm curious about is our system resources on boot so we can go over to system here and open up our task manager and see how we are running so it looks like we're using about 57 of our memory being that this is a gig that's roughly almost 600 megabytes of ram from boot which is double what we are getting in the windows 7 starter edition so overall this is still going to be too heavy and we could try to open up a web browser for example let's open up just firefox here so we're getting oh here comes firefox it's been about a minute i clicked on it again and we got a firefox is not responding error but it went ahead and opened up this time so i'm going to give this a quick minimize and i say the word quick lightly so i'm going to go ahead and hit ok and you can see now our cpu usage is around 100 the memory usage isn't too high but if we try to go to a website let's just match the same setup we did before by having google open in one tab and going to distro watch on the other tab and just like before even this isn't really going to be much of a usable experience still waiting for everything to completely load up the ram utilization didn't go up too much but just a couple tabs of firefoxes for this computer just too much stress to be even usable as you can tell zorn at least even the light version of zorn is not going to work for a piece of crap like this so what we're going to need to do is get a little bit more lightweight one i don't think we're going to be able to use just your standard desktop environment we're probably going to have to switch to something that only uses window managers and to something without all the extra fluff but at the same time you could go with something like a teeny core linux and get the absolute most bare bone but i still want this to be a friendly user experience so to meet that requirement that i have we're going to use antix linux antics linux is a very lightweight wonderful linux distribution that's going to do everything you'd want it to do it comes with a dedicated web browser office suite everything to go and get some work done it's debian based so if you have any familiarity working with the app package manager you're going to have a good time overall it's wonderful so let's go ahead i'm going to install it on this machine real quick and we're going to check out just the general user experience of it so we are booted into this linux distro and i can say already that i got it all installed and everything it's definitely a much more fluid experience compared to what we've been playing around in uh right now with nothing open you can see the ram usage right here on this sidebar and we're using 97 megabytes of ram and they've already had a couple different things open as you saw and closed some things out and the ram consumption is very low cpu right now is hovering in the low five percent range but let's go ahead and do what we were doing previously let's open up our web browser and i'm going to not cut it out here just so you guys can see how quickly it opens up that was not too bad definitely way quicker than zorn light we do see our cpu climbing here a little bit it's touching 100 here and there but it seems to have dropped back down into the 60s to 50s or even lower than that actually so it's definitely much more usable so what we're going to do real quick is go to the websites we were on on the other distros so let's go over to google.com open a new tab and you can see how much quicker that is versus the last distro we were in and from here let's go to the distrowatch.com and the cpu is definitely spiking here or there and the ram consumption is still very low with uh firefox open and two tabs we're at uh 331 megabytes of ram out of our one gigabyte and our cpu usage is cooling down a little bit hovering in between about 50 to 80 percent and if i go ahead let's open up the terminal here so we can see this just a little bit better so if i open this up i type each top enter you can see right now we are using 366 megabytes of ram and our two threads on our single core processor is hovering at that about 50 range or so right now there are only 55 tasks running well two running 55 total so go ahead and close that out here and like i had open i was kind of playing around in some of the other applications just to see how quickly everything opens up and it is a very smooth experience after playing around with this one for a little bit this is definitely one that i could use on this computer with no issues at all see if i go down here to libreoffice writer give that an open it's kind of a bigger application so i'm not going to cut anything out here so you can see the actual loading times and it is about up so this right here is one that i probably could recommend to make your crappy computer just a little bit more usable so that ended up working really well and i'm probably going to end up keeping it on this laptop and using it here or there one thing with this older laptop is the one thing that is really good about it is the keyboard it almost has like a tactile clicky feel they don't make keyboards like they used to even compared to cheap devices like this now i know i briefly went over these two linux distros if you want me to do a full dedicated kind of first look overview video of these two distros or any other distros leave them down below uh thank you to apex the apex toothbrush for sponsoring this video i never thought that i would have a toothbrush company wanting to be highlighted on a linux video but it's happened check them out and additionally thank you to all the other channel supporters specifically my youtube members and patreon supporters we have mitchell valentino phil matt kyle and teemo anthony thank you guys so much for supporting the channel it means the world to me and thank you to all the other techie and techieplus members with all that said i do hope you have a beautiful day make sure you're subscribed we have some cool projects coming up ring that bell so you don't miss those uh have a beautiful day and goodbye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 88,736

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment, lightweight linux

Id: aA5EsBtNXAk

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021