It's a real shame to see how heavy websites are these days. Some websites are heavy for a good reason, but I'd argue most of them are heavy for no reason and can provide the same functionality if they were completely static without any Javascript
No kidding. They're all so bogged down, and for seemingly no reason. I can't help but wonder if current web developers are untrained in areas that are key in efficiency. It isn't too difficult to make web sites, but can be challenging to make them efficient and quick.
Resource heavy ads, & pointless gif animations too. Some of those gifs are more resource hungry than the same amount of frames & size as in an ordinary video. Any more than a few frames, & you're better off just running video than a gif.
I learn more from Chris' videos and the comments under them than on almost any other YT channel or even from most articles. Thanks, Chris and thanks for his followers for adding further tips! My confidence is increasing thanks to you all.
Thank you for this video! It was so thorough and clear, with great comparisons, and covering exactly what the average user needs to know in plain language with just the right amount of technical detail. I have a souped-up but sluggish HP Compaq Presario which struggles to run Lubuntu 64, and I learned a lot about what I should replace it with, probably BionicPup 32. (It came with Windows Vista factory-installed, and it even struggled with that.)
I've tried it a couple of times and just can't seem to rejigger my neurons to "get" it. There are just enough odd little differences in UI interaction from more popular operating systems (including other Linux/GNU Distros) that I found it odd to spend any real amount of time in. I'm sure I'll revisit it again, but some things seem different just for the sake of being different -- maybe there are technical reasons but considering how much it can do, and the fact that it simply just does them differently, I don't know if that's true.
Don't buy. Use what u have or can get 4 free. Or just swap HDD/ssd from your recent workhorse and play without any risk getting your feet wet. Just don't dual boot. Its more trouble and somewhat risky for newbies.
@@AxelWerner I bought a 12 year old Samsung netbook with 2GB of ram for £50. Put Star Linux on it. 100MB at idle. I can throw it about my bed etc without to much worry.
Buy a new one with at least 8GB of RAM. Anything with less than 4 is just an exercise in frustration nowadays, definitely not worth it. The times of Linux being able to revive any piece of hardware are long gone thanks to internet browsers; it is no longer practical to do so.
@@ExplainingComputers I would never do this, since I find it to be in poor taste. However there is an exception to the rule. My meme answer to your roast comment of Apple: ua-cam.com/video/TFdvfrWS7XQ/v-deo.html I'm extremely sorry.
You reminded me old times! I used to have MSI Wind U100 and at that time it was really cool stuff, that's actually one of the biggest reason why i love tiny laptops to this day
Thanks for reminding me of Puppy Linux. Tinycore is the only one I've got better performance out of for old hardware, but it's not targeted at beginners and initially has quite a learning curve.
I have been using puppy Linux since 2008 on my Pentium 3 computers. Until now, I haven't got any issues with it. It's my daily driver when doing online jobs.
@Taqi Ahmad I used to do that back in Pentium 4 era with Athlon XP 1.6GHz, 512MB@400MHz RAM and Geforce 6200A. It was slow, but possible. Tho video rendering was often done in 720p and 480p. Fun times. Nowadays, even the cheapest of phones can pull 1080p video editing at better and reasonable speeds. lol
@@montre-moi Speaking from an OldSchool programmer's point of view/experience, he could do pretty much anything other than gaming and video encoding. .. (the usual simple surfing, watching videos/movies, social, etc don't really need much Juice as long as it's handled right by the OS/drivers/etc... no need for all the usual UberBloat of M$/etc)
@@BlackCatRedScarf Boy does that bring me back... and yeah, a GeForce 6800XT (tweaked, of course, lol) was my fav back then for a while... then 8800 (which is still ScreaminNicely in my 2013 HP desktop, and an nvidia in my even older 2008 Dell Enterprise-level E6500 laptop which is currently running Tiny10/Tiny11 (Windows) perfectly on 4GB ram and an ancient external Enterprise-level Hitachi 2TB big 15 yr old Refurb HD (100 MBytes/sec)...
Puppy tiene su fork imitando a MacOS - Macpup. Me recuerdo instalándolo en computadores antiguos. Recién tenia que lidiar con una computadora nueva, pero lenta - después de muchas distribuciones instalé PeppermintOS - es la mejor solución !
@@tactileslut The Battery on these EE-PCs is in the removable "Battery-Brick" on the Back Bottom of the Device, so i don't think its a Problem with the Battery
When using a browser on old hardware, I tend to set the user agent to something like android or any mobile user string. Web pages will load quicker and the browsing experience will be so much smoother because the pages are less bloated.
Great exploration here-I have a couple old netbooks of similar spec to that of your demonstration, looking forward to playing around for myself with Bionic Pup, thank you!
These EeePCs and other netbooks were all the rage during my high school days. Students would have these because they were way cheaper than many laptops (such as first generation MacBook) and had really good battery life (at that time). Performance was good enough though for basic office apps needed for school and at least they had WiFi connectivity. Now students either use iPads, Chromebooks or cheaper ultraportables for schoolwork, more so during this pandemic.
I do not recommend Chromebooks any more unless you accept that you are completely locked down by Google and have no options. We once had to discard a whole stack of these, almost new, because a principle at a local school quit and did not provide the passwords. These units are a very poor value.
@@sakienawilliams8822 Correct, but also a vast waste because of this. By the simple event of a disgruntled employee quitting a tall pile of new assets became...trash. This is not where you want to be in an age of supply chain issues and economic contractions....
compille Pale Moon 28 without generating SSE2 instructions and using the correct -march arguments on a Pentium III and you will find it is possible to use a modern feature complete web browser (pale moon) on a modern Linux kernel on a Pentium III just make sure to use a extremely low CPU usage window manager such as awesome openbox or icewm
Same here. It is fun seeing what some are still capable of, especially once given Solid State Storage. Plus I like trying different Linux distros randomly, just for the heck of it! I am replying to you on a salvaged Optiplex 790, with salvaged upgrades.
I like giving them the treatment an old machine deserves after serving well for a whole decade. Cleaning out dust, applying new high quality thermal paste, chucking a new SSD in there (if possible) and installing a fresh OS with no bloatware. Took a laptop from a colleague from 5 minutes of boot time to 8 seconds, and that was with Windows 8! He's an old pal and I didn't want to force him to learn a new OS if he's happy with his current one.
Most of the fun is in the challenge, I think. *Seeing* how efficient one can get things running, and repurposing the older (but *NOT* useless!) hardware, etc ... I'm sure we could go on for days about it.
I did this a week aogo with a 2011 Lenovo 520. I can't stand windows so installing Ubuntu Mate was a massive improvement. The laptops flies now! I should have done this years ago, linux is fantastic.
I have been using Linux distros from the very early days I even installed a 68K version on my Amiga. I still have a old IBM Think Pad With Dual boot Windows 98 or DSL. Always loved your channel 👍
In about 2009 I was able to revitalise a pre-2000 Windows 95/98 PC with Puppy Linux until it finally packed up, in about 2012..... It enabled my father-in-law to get a few more years out of it before getting a newer used laptop....
It's always great to see more efforts in helping giving old hardware more life so that they will not end up becoming landfill. One thing that I find extremely useful when it comes to old netbooks and such is having them as a cheap and easy way to provide video conferencing to the elderly and people who don't have any technical knowledge. I've given a couple of netbooks to relatives who unfortunately can't be outside as they're extremely vulnerable to the outbreak and the netbooks helped keep them in touch with others.
My computer with the exact same specifications played youtube much better on xp than this computer on linux, at least on lubuntu I haven't finished watching the video but I have to do chores rn.
We used the same distros on a Lenovo t410 from 2010. Because the hardware on the thinkpad is usually pretty good, these distros performed rather well. We preferred BionicPup and Lubuntu. Great and useful content.
This is a super video you did Christopher. These are my favorite versions of Linux! The first Linux I used was Caldera Linux in the late '90's. I really like to put Linux on my older Laptops. I have more sophisticated Laptops than this EPC, I have an Acer Aspire One, Atom Duo Core, with 2 GB RAM, and a 160 GB Hard Drive, three Toshiba A215, AMD X64 Duo Cores, and a newer Toshiba Celeron 2GB w only a 32 GB ECC, ( the kind of SSD that is soldered onto the motherboard). My favorite Linux versions that I use an all of these is Lubuntu 18.04 32 Bit, (64 Bit on the Celeron), and ZorinOS 15.03 Lite 32 Bit, and ZorinOS 15.03 Core 64 Bit on one of the Toshibas. I use the VirtualBox with these O/S's as the Host. Now, XP is pretty good if one uses Panda Dome Free AntiVirus, has all the updates, (see ERPMAN Main Internet site), it operates Office 2007 very well. The Bionic Pup Linux 32 Bit I have not used before, only Slacko, and Lucid, it looks great. For me, I agree, I would use the Bionic Pub on the EPC, yet it was amazing how well all three of them ran on that lightweight Laptop. The reason I liked this video so much was Christopher actually is suggesting the best versions of Linux for older Laptops I have been using for a few years now. Good stuff!
I’m definitely going to have to try out BionicPup 32! Looking forward to your video. I have to confess that you could probably make videos on most anything and I’d enjoy it. You are a talented filmmaker indeed!
That was an extremely low-spec bit of kit on which to attempt to load a current OS, but commendation to BionicPup 32 for amazing performance "out of the box"!
Old computers would come with great sound systems, because music was more important back then, those old HPs and IBMs would still play better sounding music than modern laptops with built in speakers.
I've got about a dozen 1005s at work collecting dust, but right now I'm thinking their best use might be install RPi Desktop (for the educational apps) and giving them away to coworkers with younger children to use. They're basically disposable.
talking about weirdest machine, i heard about a prescott from intel got 64bit on socket 478, i just found a seller, i will see can i get one of those from that seller
I bought one as my extra computer in 2008, I think. Me and my gf shared a beefy laptop and we were living together so it was a perfect addition . Then she broke up, and the eee901 ended up being my only computer for a long while. I used it for school work, watched movies (got it to run 720 movies nicely on my TV), and I think I even played some games on it. It fit so nicely into my bag, battery was great, and I just loved it. I miss that laptop like a dead pet but it just couldn't keep up and I ended up throwing it out after it spent years collecting dust in a closet.
Nice to see BionicPup coming out on top. I use the 64 bit version on my main rig as my daily OS and on an older PC also. I run other Linux distros as well but Puppy has always been my favourite.
I just wish browser devs and developers for the various big sites would also code with optimization in mind. UA-cam used to run well 10 years ago on much slower computers, of course with a few less features, but at least the basic function of those sites worked. I feel many devs nowadays code more wastefully because most computers can take it without big problems, but if most applications and sites were properly optimized I could multitask more and use less energy. I wonder how much energy is waste by computers needslessly calculating overcomplicated and bloated code on a worldwide basis.
A couple years ago a colleague asked me to take a look at her Atom based netbook. She thought it might have a virus because it was sluggish browsing the internet, showing me for example, that Yahoo Mail was painfully slow. Since I use a dedicated e-mail client, I didn't noticed right away that her netbook wasn't with a virus. It was in fact that their new website for e-mail was stupidly heavy, even on a more capable i5 notebook I use. So I explained to her the situation and suggested she start to use Thunderbird, instead of opening a browser to check her e-mails. Or she could get a newer machine, which she did.
I completely agree, I ran into this problem with one website my mother uses on her 13 year old laptop. It ran fine until a couple of weeks ago when it was still running all its content as flash, they poorly switched whatever they could over to HTML5 and got rid of everything they couldn't switch over and now you need a quad core CPU and 4GB of ram to play simple card games. I tried it on a couple of my computers including a Raspberry Pi 4 (where it did work on), but nothing under 4 cores or 4GB of ram. Different browsers made no difference. They blamed it all on HTML5 and how slow it was, but that was just all lies. Other websites switched over to HTML5 years ago and you could barely notice it, but if you wait to the last possible moment and bodge something together last minute, it's not going to be optimized and you're going to need a new computer for something you were able to do with the same graphics and game play of 30 years ago. The company that runs the website figures that people who don't buy new computers are not going to add to their income anyway, so why bother catering to them? People with newer computers aren't going to notice much unless they try to multitask, so why even try to improve things?
Nice to see the Eee PC getting some love I have the original 701 I use to load my OS on SD or USB pen drive. I fitted mine with 2GB or Ram. I still use mine as a thin client.
Right on.... those little Asus sets are definitely cool. I have the Eee PC T91MT and it's so tiny and cute and awesome and even though it's not quite as fast as my other sets, it's still my favorite.
Great tip! This is the best OS up to now to revive my old 1core/2threads 2Gb RAM netbook. It also works like a charm on newer computers to make them much faster.
A good video, I maintained several of the Atom devices and it lead the way to what we have now in our mobile phones. I always had the feeling that they should go faster than they did, and were performance throttled to save on power consumption. I look forward to the upgrading old PC videos which have the advantage of being able to upgrade the memory to a significant level, putting in SDD devices.
Well, this is great timing for me! I just dug out my old netbook, it’s a lovely wee machine, that I was just thinking needed to do something more than just sit in a cupboard. Thanks Chris 😃
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I was an early adopter of Puppy when a genius by the name of Barry Kauler masterfully spearheaded the Puppy Linux project. I ran it on an IBM Netvista and although I had two Macs, I had more fun with Puppy. Note that it's probably the only distro that loads into RAM. Cheers.
there are others per a wikipedia list, but it seems to presently be the only worthwhile one to run from RAM-- so I agree w/you mostly. it's been a long time since I tested some of the others, but kept going back to Puppy. I think two (off the top of my head) were Kanotix (Debian 10 based) and Slax, iirc. I actually couldn't figure out how to run those two via ram as they didn't seem to have the best documentation on their sites at the time. The only thing I don't like about puppy is that it's very difficult to update anything last time I used it. I also remember not being able to install some programs as I think the compatible packages were not standard ("pet", iirc). The primary thing I use puppy for is very old laptops or desktops to use as exercises in game emulation of classic console/arcade games via retroarch mostly. I mostly use and recommend Peppermint for most pc's w/2GB ram or more along with an ssd where possible.
@@linuxlover_8436 I agree...apps are hit or miss on Puppy and the graphics are all over the place. Still, it can be very useful in rescue situations or on the go on an other box where you don't want to leave a trace. Plus you're root from the get go. My daily distro is MX but for newbies I always recommend Mint.
So would it run on a "really" old computer like Sony Vaio PCG-VX88??? It's still sitting on my shelf collecting too much dust, turns on, has the old office programs etc. LOL. Would love to give it a TLC.
i have been interested in linux for about 3 years now. but i kinda forgot about most of the distros. when i saw the word lubuntu. i felt nostalgic. Thank you!
When i quit windows in 2019, i didn't look back, moving to linux was the best decision of my life, i had to drop a few games, but the trade off of being able to use linux was still an overwhelming net positive, the insane level of customizability, the choices, the speed, the freedom, made me never ever want to go back to windows, it's straight up a no BS operating system. Not only that but linux has evolved drastically in the past 3 years, now in about a month here, most games that were previously incompatible due to anticheat, will be compatible via proton on steam as valve has gotten the AC devs to make a proton implementation.
Explaining Computers is one of a few channels that I look forward to new releases from, and even fewer whose videos I can repeatedly watch over and over again and still enjoy. Aside from that, I'm really curious to see how Linux would run on my M1 MacBook (as well as how long the battery would last) but unfortunately it just doesn't seem easy to get at this point.
For a while after 32 bit ISOs stop being distributed you might be able to cross-compile from source. When compatibility switches about the size of a stored value get ripped out that'll stop.
wanna hear an ironic fact? an windows 10 mini os runs way better on an old hardware than all of this linux distros search: windows 10 mini os or windows 10 delta os
A tip to anyone worried about slow UA-cam playback on an old machine: linux allows you to copy the link of the video you want to watch on a program like VLC or MPV and it will run just fine!
Yup. I wonder how much of the playback issue is the older hardware, and how much of that is due to the overhead of the web browser to get to it...Firefox isn't exactly lightweight anymore. :-/
It does help significantly but there's only so much it can do on something like this, video decoding is very intensive and something we take for granted. I have an EeePC 900 and can tell you that HD video is not gonna play friendly.
But, is XP much lighter and faster on a decent PC if run in a VM? I loaded Windows 10 yesterday in a VM and am now wondering if Windows 7 (32-bit even?!) or even XP would run faster. not sure yet if the software I need will work on such old Windows versions. Any hints for me?
I'm currently using MX Linux on an old Acer Aspire 1. It's not as fast as Puppy Linux but it runs really well. I also replaced Firefox by Falkon on it. The speed increase for internet browsing was dramatically improved.
13:33 - It seems to be rendering correctly, as you've spaced things with just text (so nothing fancy at all there, which would be good for old computers and OSs), the line broke correctly and the text of the menu appears centered as it should. The problem is that that Linux distro doesn't have any of the sans serif fonts you added on the font-family style rule. It would probably work as intended if you added "sans-serif" to the end of that aforementioned rule.
I am running Antix 19 on my eeePC 701 of 2008 vintage (4GB of built-in eMMC and I had upgraded the RAM to 1GB). I tried Lubuntu (sluggish) and HaikuOS (nice, but not serious enough, and did not support the webcam).
Excellent tutorial. I just installed Bionic Pup on my wife's old HP laptop. It originally was Windows 7 but after upgrading to Windows 10 it became practically useless. I'll probably use it to run my CNC machine or 3D printer. First I booted it from a USB drive. After seeing how good the performance was I did the install onto the HDD. The boot loader now gives me a choice of booting Windows or Bionic Pup - very slick!
I don't wipe windows, sometimes its hard to find old drivers, or I want XP to run an old piece of software. Better to just put another hard drive in it since they are cheap.
Thanks for a great video with clear explanations. I tried linux Mint on an old Acer notebook but, it is still struggling. I'm going to try BionicPup to see what happens. Watching videos on UA-cam is nice but not the only use for a computer. I'm now a subscriber to this excellent channel.
What a lovely project - a few months ago, I installed Debian onto this laptop's little brother, the 701SD. Glad to see I'm not the only one who gave this concept a shot!
Ditto, Raspberry Pi OS for desktop is my go-to distro anymore. Lite, quick and capable. Runs flawlessly on my original Dell Mini 9, IBM Thinkpads, and Lenovo desktop. At its heart is Debian with the awesome RPi desktop.
I installed this "bionic pup 1 " and absolutely love it thx for the point in the right direction in bringing life to a eeepc lying around doing nothing, will continue to follow an share your efforts thanks chris
@@ExplainingComputers alot of your content is fantasic for myself and community of ham/amateur radio operators use single board computers so keep the content coming thank you and il continue to follow and support your channel
Another great video! I run Lubuntu on my old EeePC 1000HA and find that it runs very well. I keep it on my desk at work, it's useful for helping to diagnose network faults, bring up router configuration pages and whatnot. BionicPup looks very interesting, I'll have to give it a try.
I swear that Mr. Barnett can read minds. This is the third time I had a project and suddenly... BAM! Explaining Computers publishes a video related to my project. Anyway, Looks like that old computer has the same performance as a Raspberry Pi Zero W, I basically get the same speeds and experience.
We got several of these EeePCs back in 2008 at my workplace. They have all been retired from their original purpose at this point. However, I still have one of these running in my office. It provides a wireless access point for IT personnel in the area and for certain maintenance purposes. It also serves out a USB label printer on the network. The specifications for ours seem exactly the same except that they have two 8GB SSDs instead of one (and they are black instead of white). As far as Windows XP went on these computers, my experience is with XP Professional. I found that by the time all the updates that XP eventually got were installed, you ran out of room on the 8GB SSD. You could delete backup files and move the page file to the second drive, but you really had to shoehorn XP with all the updates into these machines. On the ones we had, you could get the most out of the drive space in Linux by using LVM to combine the two drives into one volume. For clarification, this netbook was very low spec (the nature of netbooks) even when it was released. Athlon64, Pentium D, and Core2 chips (all 64 bit) had come out by this time, and there were 32 bit chips that outperformed these by quite a lot. I am running Debian 10 (Stable) on this machine, and it works pretty well. I have experimented with others of these netbooks (with identical specs). I have found that any of the 18.04 Ubuntu variations (the last with 32 bit support) are still a bit heavy for this hardware. Debian with a lighter weight desktop environment or window manager (XFCE or lighter) will work better. I have found that running Compton as a compositor actually seems to improve performance a bit, presumably because it shifts some of the processing load from the CPU to the GPU. I still feel confident that BionicPup would be lighter, but Debian 10 easily works better than Lubuntu 18.04 or Zorin OS Lite 15.3. There are things you can do for better results with UA-cam, like using mpv + youtube_dl. I imagine that lighter browsers and/or forcing h.264 video could help as well. I notice that the video on the netbook used for your experiments seems to have at least one broken color channel on the display (green, it would appear). These machines tend to have a blue shift if not color calibrated, but not that much of a blue shift. This is usually caused by a cable or connector issue, though that is a pain when it's a laptop/netbook.
I once had 4 IDE HDDs, one SCSI and 2 optical SCSI devices (a CD-RW and a DVD ROM) on my Athlon XP. While those HDDs were small and not the same capacity, I made them dynamic disks and somehow merged together so the OS would see one huge HDD with the capacity equal to the sum of all phisical HDDs. The OS was XP pro. HowI did it? I do not remember but I am sure that I did something in the disk manager after a fresh install of the OS. Maybe you can replicate this and "merge" those small SSDs in one big HDD to have enough space. Also, Asus have a utility (C2D or something that moves "Program Files" folder location from C to D thus freeing C drive for Windows folder)
Thanks for the great video! Just installed bionicpup32 on my old laptop after trying 5-6 different lightweight distros... Puppy is indeed the best in terms of going easy on all components: cpu, ram, storage :)
I got an old Compaq laptop for free on Craigslist, 1.7 Ghz, duel core with 3 gigs ram. I run MX Linux 19.3 32bit on it, and it runs like a champ! MX Linux is by far, the absolute best distro I've tried (and I've tested over 60!!). Debian based, fast, light on resources, continued 32bit support, excellent documentation, and friendly, knowledgeable people on their Facebook group. Other distros that might work well on this specific computer are: * Q4OS * antiX * "Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac" AKA "Debian Buster with Raspberry Pi Desktop" Q4OS is likely to run best on this guys laptop in this video. It's super light weight, small, fast and very easy to use even for Windows users.
@@oneszeros1 I've got about 30 or 40 full computer systems (You should see my closet, and my storage unit!!, speakers not included. I wish I could post pictures here!), and something like... 8 or 9 laptops. I fix them up & sell them cheap. (Usually with Windows 10, but I offer basic linux installs too. I've got a few Windows XP era computers & laptops that are somewhat in this computers hardware range. I could install Windows XP on them & sell them for "Retro Gaming Computers" but I want to install Q4OS on, and then see if I can install some Pre-school software on them for children. Then donate them to families that can't afford a basic system. (I really don't like the look of Puppy Linux, and I don't know how to make major desktop changes... See? I'm still a n00b! LOL!) It's not much, but... It will get them online, they can browse the web, do emails, write office documents, maybe listen to music & watch a DVD, and / or the child of the family has software to help keep them busy and learning. :)
Christopher, if you would use Lynx (terminal browser) and you would download the videos and play those in vlc/mpc then you could probably get much more out of that laptop. Something for a future video.
It used to be really easy to stream youtube vids directly in vlc, That's what I would do for my old t43 and it cut memory usage a lot. Doing so has given me trouble lately and I don't know if that is my fault, the machine, or something youtube has changed. If you can get it to work I'd recommend it.
@@enzoloconte553 UA-cam had some changes, youtube-dl also broke in the past but it has been working without problems if you keep using the latest version.
Oh man, I remember when these tiny Eee PC netbooks were all the craze around here. I've formatted and installed Windows XP on so many of these back in the day for my clients. Always had trouble dealing with the software package to install vs. the available storage. Always had to make some compromises and leave out some basic necessary program and a lot of the owners simply wouldn't understand, let alone accept, that some program they wanted would not be installed because there wasn't enough available storage. Fun times. lol
This video is still quite informative. I've been on a kick lately of getting old Eee PCs and bringing them back to life. They were so small, but chonky. I love the form factor. You can add the 32 bit Debian 12 to the list. Debian's installer is much easier to use, now, and getting an XFCE install going takes no time at all.
I have what was probably the last Lenovo netbook (2 GB ram) and I run Elive on it. A little slow at times, but since it's a backup computer I don't mind. I remember these netbooks were quite popular at the school I taught in, especially among IB students.
Indeed, browsers are really inefficient video players. I use mpv for all my youtube needs even on modern machines, because I prefer the battery to last longer than the video I'm watching.
The cool thing is that it's all in the flash drive and only uses the RAM,so it leaves no trace on the HDD if anonymity is required.Interesting how it updates the software on the flash drive too.
Such a joyful review 😊 18:09 "you can do it!" From all of these, Zorin OS is my favorite due to it's design. I have a notebook with windows (4GB ram, 500GB HD and core i3) that's very unresponsive... maybe linux will improve it's capabilities
You must've been reading my mind, Chris. I have literally just dug my Dad's PC out for a freshen-up (still runs XP) and can't run Windows 10. Unfortunately Linux Mint Cinnamon is a bit slow, so was wondering about a lighter flavour of Linux. Your vid has helped me right out. A belated Happy New Year and I look forward to many more videos. Thanks :D
my 40-year-old uncle has been fixing computer and laptop tech since 2021, I might show this video to him and explain why there is Linux, which is way better in performance than Windows, but there are lightweight Windows versions from my country... thank you, Chris!
It's a real shame to see how heavy websites are these days. Some websites are heavy for a good reason, but I'd argue most of them are heavy for no reason and can provide the same functionality if they were completely static without any Javascript
Agreed.
Trackers, everywhere...
No kidding. They're all so bogged down, and for seemingly no reason. I can't help but wonder if current web developers are untrained in areas that are key in efficiency. It isn't too difficult to make web sites, but can be challenging to make them efficient and quick.
Resource heavy ads, & pointless gif animations too. Some of those gifs are more resource hungry than the same amount of frames & size as in an ordinary video. Any more than a few frames, & you're better off just running video than a gif.
@@Hunnter2k3 amen, I wish more of my web dev brothers would agree :^)
When your computer is taking some time to load something just encourage it and cheer for it and it will load it up faster.
:)
Not really, but you can try :)
My Good Woman's (tm) attitude is to threaten said computer with defenestration.
With an old television (when the cabinets were made from wood) you could just hit it.
just call cheerleaders
I learn more from Chris' videos and the comments under them than on almost any other YT channel or even from most articles. Thanks, Chris and thanks for his followers for adding further tips! My confidence is increasing thanks to you all.
Thank you for this video! It was so thorough and clear, with great comparisons, and covering exactly what the average user needs to know in plain language with just the right amount of technical detail. I have a souped-up but sluggish HP Compaq Presario which struggles to run Lubuntu 64, and I learned a lot about what I should replace it with, probably BionicPup 32. (It came with Windows Vista factory-installed, and it even struggled with that.)
When I saw puppy on the list I knew the answer, the puppy project is stellar and I hope they stick around for a long time.
I've tried it a couple of times and just can't seem to rejigger my neurons to "get" it. There are just enough odd little differences in UI interaction from more popular operating systems (including other Linux/GNU Distros) that I found it odd to spend any real amount of time in. I'm sure I'll revisit it again, but some things seem different just for the sake of being different -- maybe there are technical reasons but considering how much it can do, and the fact that it simply just does them differently, I don't know if that's true.
I was thinking of buying an old laptop just to play around with linux and boom there's a new video from you!
Spooky!
Don't buy. Use what u have or can get 4 free. Or just swap HDD/ssd from your recent workhorse and play without any risk getting your feet wet. Just don't dual boot. Its more trouble and somewhat risky for newbies.
@@AxelWerner I bought a 12 year old Samsung netbook with 2GB of ram for £50. Put Star Linux on it. 100MB at idle. I can throw it about my bed etc without to much worry.
Buy a new one with at least 8GB of RAM. Anything with less than 4 is just an exercise in frustration nowadays, definitely not worth it. The times of Linux being able to revive any piece of hardware are long gone thanks to internet browsers; it is no longer practical to do so.
Go right ahead, I just did that several months ago installing Mint 20 on an old 11 year old Toshiba and it runs quite well.
It still has more ports than a MacBook
The average block of wood has more ports than a MacBook.
@@ExplainingComputers 😂
@@ExplainingComputers I would never do this, since I find it to be in poor taste. However there is an exception to the rule.
My meme answer to your roast comment of Apple:
ua-cam.com/video/TFdvfrWS7XQ/v-deo.html
I'm extremely sorry.
Haha, newer macbooks are virtually the same as 2016-2017 models..
If your going by the ports, lmao
You reminded me old times! I used to have MSI Wind U100 and at that time it was really cool stuff, that's actually one of the biggest reason why i love tiny laptops to this day
Thanks for reminding me of Puppy Linux. Tinycore is the only one I've got better performance out of for old hardware, but it's not targeted at beginners and initially has quite a learning curve.
I have been using puppy Linux since 2008 on my Pentium 3 computers. Until now, I haven't got any issues with it. It's my daily driver when doing online jobs.
@Taqi Ahmad obviously no
P3's can't do that
@Taqi Ahmad I used to do that back in Pentium 4 era with Athlon XP 1.6GHz, 512MB@400MHz RAM and Geforce 6200A. It was slow, but possible. Tho video rendering was often done in 720p and 480p. Fun times.
Nowadays, even the cheapest of phones can pull 1080p video editing at better and reasonable speeds. lol
What do you do with it?
@@montre-moi Speaking from an OldSchool programmer's point of view/experience, he could do pretty much anything other than gaming and video encoding.
..
(the usual simple surfing, watching videos/movies, social, etc don't really need much Juice as long as it's handled right by the OS/drivers/etc... no need for all the usual UberBloat of M$/etc)
@@BlackCatRedScarf Boy does that bring me back... and yeah, a GeForce 6800XT (tweaked, of course, lol) was my fav back then for a while... then 8800 (which is still ScreaminNicely in my 2013 HP desktop, and an nvidia in my even older 2008 Dell Enterprise-level E6500 laptop which is currently running Tiny10/Tiny11 (Windows) perfectly on 4GB ram and an ancient external Enterprise-level Hitachi 2TB big 15 yr old Refurb HD (100 MBytes/sec)...
I am such a sucker for old netbook, I'm really happy that there is still support for them with Linux!
I realized I said netbook instead of netbooks, I don’t want to edit it because I will lose the heart
@Peter Mortensen they are cute I guess????
@@aretard7995 they are :)
Same, i like the old chunky yet compact size of them
Please see my main comment made today:)
Excellent topic, bring old equipment more life.
Yes. Let's keep some old hardware in use.
After seeing the EC UA-cam play I wouldn't call it life. let's say... Undead? But anyway, good show 👍
@@ExplainingComputers This could have been a lens artifact but it looked like the keyboard was bowed up in the middle. The battery may have puffed up.
Puppy tiene su fork imitando a MacOS - Macpup. Me recuerdo instalándolo en computadores antiguos. Recién tenia que lidiar con una computadora nueva, pero lenta - después de muchas distribuciones instalé PeppermintOS - es la mejor solución !
@@tactileslut The Battery on these EE-PCs is in the removable "Battery-Brick" on the Back Bottom of the Device, so i don't think its a Problem with the Battery
When using a browser on old hardware, I tend to set the user agent to something like android or any mobile user string. Web pages will load quicker and the browsing experience will be so much smoother because the pages are less bloated.
ooh that's actually smart. Are phone webpages ok to navigate on a computer though ?
that is so smart!!
ok thats pretty big brain, never thought of that
silent 7 strikes from the shadows with the blade of knowledge
@@silent_7753
Hello, how can i do this?
Great exploration here-I have a couple old netbooks of similar spec to that of your demonstration, looking forward to playing around for myself with Bionic Pup, thank you!
Please see my main comment made today:)
These EeePCs and other netbooks were all the rage during my high school days. Students would have these because they were way cheaper than many laptops (such as first generation MacBook) and had really good battery life (at that time). Performance was good enough though for basic office apps needed for school and at least they had WiFi connectivity.
Now students either use iPads, Chromebooks or cheaper ultraportables for schoolwork, more so during this pandemic.
yeah ipads are dope. I use my ipad for 90% of my browsing.
@@funnyberries4017 apple should allow gecko engine to run on ios,and fly web
I do not recommend Chromebooks any more unless you accept that you are completely
locked down by Google and have no options. We once had to discard a whole stack of
these, almost new, because a principle at a local school quit and did not provide the
passwords. These units are a very poor value.
@@snsm6730 That's because those school devices are really tailored to be locked down like that, a personal device is much more open.
@@sakienawilliams8822 Correct, but also a
vast waste because of this. By the simple
event of a disgruntled employee quitting a
tall pile of new assets became...trash. This
is not where you want to be in an age of
supply chain issues and economic contractions....
How many years until _"But can it run Crysis?"_ becomes _"But can it run any browser?"_
I think we are already there. Some systems freeze upon opening a 3rd browser tab.
"But can it open a Forbes article?"
@@readme_nfo "I had it loaded, but then the cookies notification pop up overwhelmed my RAM"
compille Pale Moon 28 without generating SSE2 instructions and using the correct -march arguments on a Pentium III and you will find it is possible to use a modern feature complete web browser (pale moon) on a modern Linux kernel on a Pentium III just make sure to use a extremely low CPU usage window manager such as awesome openbox or icewm
6 months
and i am saying a lot of time
I love tinkering and making the best out of old PC's...This topic is really intriguing .... Awesome video 👍
Same here. It is fun seeing what some are still capable of, especially once given Solid State Storage. Plus I like trying different Linux distros randomly, just for the heck of it! I am replying to you on a salvaged Optiplex 790, with salvaged upgrades.
I like giving them the treatment an old machine deserves after serving well for a whole decade. Cleaning out dust, applying new high quality thermal paste, chucking a new SSD in there (if possible) and installing a fresh OS with no bloatware. Took a laptop from a colleague from 5 minutes of boot time to 8 seconds, and that was with Windows 8! He's an old pal and I didn't want to force him to learn a new OS if he's happy with his current one.
I’m with you three chaps as well!
Most of the fun is in the challenge, I think. *Seeing* how efficient one can get things running, and repurposing the older (but *NOT* useless!) hardware, etc ... I'm sure we could go on for days about it.
I did this a week aogo with a 2011 Lenovo 520. I can't stand windows so installing Ubuntu Mate was a massive improvement. The laptops flies now! I should have done this years ago, linux is fantastic.
I have been using Linux distros from the very early days I even installed a 68K version on my Amiga. I still have a old IBM Think Pad With Dual boot Windows 98 or DSL. Always loved your channel 👍
:)
puppy linux has always been my go to on old hardware
In about 2009 I was able to revitalise a pre-2000 Windows 95/98 PC with Puppy Linux until it finally packed up, in about 2012..... It enabled my father-in-law to get a few more years out of it before getting a newer used laptop....
It's always great to see more efforts in helping giving old hardware more life so that they will not end up becoming landfill.
One thing that I find extremely useful when it comes to old netbooks and such is having them as a cheap and easy way to provide video conferencing to the elderly and people who don't have any technical knowledge. I've given a couple of netbooks to relatives who unfortunately can't be outside as they're extremely vulnerable to the outbreak and the netbooks helped keep them in touch with others.
You are a good man.
Great idea
Truly a very nice gesture
My computer with the exact same specifications played youtube much better on xp than this computer on linux, at least on lubuntu I haven't finished watching the video but I have to do chores rn.
We used the same distros on a Lenovo t410 from 2010. Because the hardware on the thinkpad is usually pretty good, these distros performed rather well. We preferred BionicPup and Lubuntu. Great and useful content.
This is insane I literally installed Lubuntu on the exact same EEEPC last week!!! Amazing video Chris!
No way!
@@ExplainingComputers What are the odds!
I installed Lubuntu onto an Aspire One. It's good to see people using old hardware.
This is a super video you did Christopher. These are my favorite versions of Linux! The first Linux I used was Caldera Linux in the late '90's. I really like to put Linux on my older Laptops. I have more sophisticated Laptops than this EPC, I have an Acer Aspire One, Atom Duo Core, with 2 GB RAM, and a 160 GB Hard Drive, three Toshiba A215, AMD X64 Duo Cores, and a newer Toshiba Celeron 2GB w only a 32 GB ECC, ( the kind of SSD that is soldered onto the motherboard). My favorite Linux versions that I use an all of these is Lubuntu 18.04 32 Bit, (64 Bit on the Celeron), and ZorinOS 15.03 Lite 32 Bit, and ZorinOS 15.03 Core 64 Bit on one of the Toshibas. I use the VirtualBox with these O/S's as the Host. Now, XP is pretty good if one uses Panda Dome Free AntiVirus, has all the updates, (see ERPMAN Main Internet site), it operates Office 2007 very well. The Bionic Pup Linux 32 Bit I have not used before, only Slacko, and Lucid, it looks great. For me, I agree, I would use the Bionic Pub on the EPC, yet it was amazing how well all three of them ran on that lightweight Laptop. The reason I liked this video so much was Christopher actually is suggesting the best versions of Linux for older Laptops I have been using for a few years now. Good stuff!
Oh cool, my wife used that Eeepc (with Mint) a lot, should try the upgrade.
I’m definitely going to have to try out BionicPup 32! Looking forward to your video. I have to confess that you could probably make videos on most anything and I’d enjoy it. You are a talented filmmaker indeed!
Video length 20 minutes
Posted 16 minutes ago
195 people (plus me) liked the video before finishing it, testament to EC's consistent quality x)
@Graham Nichols He is such a cutie. Love that subtle British humor.
That was an extremely low-spec bit of kit on which to attempt to load a current OS, but commendation to BionicPup 32 for amazing performance "out of the box"!
That little EeePC is lovely. Just trying Puppy on my old EeePC 1001HA to see how it performs. Great video of what each OS has to offer
Thanks!
Thanks for your support, most appreciated. :)
Seeing Dolby Sound Room on such a old laptop is very rare
Old computers would come with great sound systems, because music was more important back then, those old HPs and IBMs would still play better sounding music than modern laptops with built in speakers.
@@Xergecuz You're more or less right, but the eepc range is definitely NOT an example of that.
I got the weirdest nostalgia hit from that laptop...
I have a 701. I used it a lot at the time.
Same. I was expected him to try out Linux Lite 2.8, which works great and has looooowww hardware requirements.
I've got about a dozen 1005s at work collecting dust, but right now I'm thinking their best use might be install RPi Desktop (for the educational apps) and giving them away to coworkers with younger children to use. They're basically disposable.
talking about weirdest machine, i heard about a prescott from intel got 64bit on socket 478, i just found a seller, i will see can i get one of those from that seller
I bought one as my extra computer in 2008, I think. Me and my gf shared a beefy laptop and we were living together so it was a perfect addition . Then she broke up, and the eee901 ended up being my only computer for a long while. I used it for school work, watched movies (got it to run 720 movies nicely on my TV), and I think I even played some games on it. It fit so nicely into my bag, battery was great, and I just loved it. I miss that laptop like a dead pet but it just couldn't keep up and I ended up throwing it out after it spent years collecting dust in a closet.
Nice to see BionicPup coming out on top. I use the 64 bit version on my main rig as my daily OS and on an older PC also. I run other Linux distros as well but Puppy has always been my favourite.
Thank you, very informative. I've got an old notebook lying around, gonna try the pup.
Excellent camera work at 2:30. No glare on the screen, with good lighting and the laptop screen position is perfectly parallel to my tablet screen 😀👍
BionicPup is pretty amazing! I have a couple of old laptops that I might just try this on, thanks as always Chris!
Greetings Chris. :)
Same, I was using Lububntu but the Pup seems to work even better
I just wish browser devs and developers for the various big sites would also code with optimization in mind. UA-cam used to run well 10 years ago on much slower computers, of course with a few less features, but at least the basic function of those sites worked. I feel many devs nowadays code more wastefully because most computers can take it without big problems, but if most applications and sites were properly optimized I could multitask more and use less energy. I wonder how much energy is waste by computers needslessly calculating overcomplicated and bloated code on a worldwide basis.
Agreed. The early web got people writing efficient code again. But this trend has sadly gone away now.
Ayup. Websites need to be much more optimized. I don't care if it will look bad or not.
A couple years ago a colleague asked me to take a look at her Atom based netbook. She thought it might have a virus because it was sluggish browsing the internet, showing me for example, that Yahoo Mail was painfully slow.
Since I use a dedicated e-mail client, I didn't noticed right away that her netbook wasn't with a virus. It was in fact that their new website for e-mail was stupidly heavy, even on a more capable i5 notebook I use.
So I explained to her the situation and suggested she start to use Thunderbird, instead of opening a browser to check her e-mails. Or she could get a newer machine, which she did.
I completely agree, I ran into this problem with one website my mother uses on her 13 year old laptop. It ran fine until a couple of weeks ago when it was still running all its content as flash, they poorly switched whatever they could over to HTML5 and got rid of everything they couldn't switch over and now you need a quad core CPU and 4GB of ram to play simple card games. I tried it on a couple of my computers including a Raspberry Pi 4 (where it did work on), but nothing under 4 cores or 4GB of ram. Different browsers made no difference. They blamed it all on HTML5 and how slow it was, but that was just all lies.
Other websites switched over to HTML5 years ago and you could barely notice it, but if you wait to the last possible moment and bodge something together last minute, it's not going to be optimized and you're going to need a new computer for something you were able to do with the same graphics and game play of 30 years ago.
The company that runs the website figures that people who don't buy new computers are not going to add to their income anyway, so why bother catering to them? People with newer computers aren't going to notice much unless they try to multitask, so why even try to improve things?
10 years ago, UA-cam used to run via flash player. A minute of dilence to Flash player, please!
Nice to see the Eee PC getting some love I have the original 701 I use to load my OS on SD or USB pen drive. I fitted mine with 2GB or Ram. I still use mine as a thin client.
Right on.... those little Asus sets are definitely cool. I have the Eee PC T91MT and it's so tiny and cute and awesome and even though it's not quite as fast as my other sets, it's still my favorite.
Great tip! This is the best OS up to now to revive my old 1core/2threads 2Gb RAM netbook. It also works like a charm on newer computers to make them much faster.
A good video, I maintained several of the Atom devices and it lead the way to what we have now in our mobile phones. I always had the feeling that they should go faster than they did, and were performance throttled to save on power consumption. I look forward to the upgrading old PC videos which have the advantage of being able to upgrade the memory to a significant level, putting in SDD devices.
Good video as always, I've used antiX Linux on old hardware. Works great.
Well, this is great timing for me!
I just dug out my old netbook, it’s a lovely wee machine, that I was just thinking needed to do something more than just sit in a cupboard.
Thanks Chris 😃
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I was an early adopter of Puppy when a genius by the name of Barry Kauler masterfully spearheaded the Puppy Linux project. I ran it on an IBM Netvista and although I had two Macs, I had more fun with Puppy. Note that it's probably the only distro that loads into RAM. Cheers.
there are others per a wikipedia list, but it seems to presently be the only worthwhile one to run from RAM-- so I agree w/you mostly. it's been a long time since I tested some of the others, but kept going back to Puppy. I think two (off the top of my head) were Kanotix (Debian 10 based) and Slax, iirc. I actually couldn't figure out how to run those two via ram as they didn't seem to have the best documentation on their sites at the time. The only thing I don't like about puppy is that it's very difficult to update anything last time I used it. I also remember not being able to install some programs as I think the compatible packages were not standard ("pet", iirc). The primary thing I use puppy for is very old laptops or desktops to use as exercises in game emulation of classic console/arcade games via retroarch mostly. I mostly use and recommend Peppermint for most pc's w/2GB ram or more along with an ssd where possible.
@@linuxlover_8436 I agree...apps are hit or miss on Puppy and the graphics are all over the place. Still, it can be very useful in rescue situations or on the go on an other box where you don't want to leave a trace. Plus you're root from the get go. My daily distro is MX but for newbies I always recommend Mint.
So would it run on a "really" old computer like Sony Vaio PCG-VX88??? It's still sitting on my shelf collecting too much dust, turns on, has the old office programs etc. LOL. Would love to give it a TLC.
i have been interested in linux for about 3 years now.
but i kinda forgot about most of the distros.
when i saw the word lubuntu. i felt nostalgic. Thank you!
When i quit windows in 2019, i didn't look back, moving to linux was the best decision of my life, i had to drop a few games, but the trade off of being able to use linux was still an overwhelming net positive, the insane level of customizability, the choices, the speed, the freedom, made me never ever want to go back to windows, it's straight up a no BS operating system.
Not only that but linux has evolved drastically in the past 3 years, now in about a month here, most games that were previously incompatible due to anticheat, will be compatible via proton on steam as valve has gotten the AC devs to make a proton implementation.
Explaining Computers is one of a few channels that I look forward to new releases from, and even fewer whose videos I can repeatedly watch over and over again and still enjoy. Aside from that, I'm really curious to see how Linux would run on my M1 MacBook (as well as how long the battery would last) but unfortunately it just doesn't seem easy to get at this point.
Antix is still available in 32 bit. Bit quirky but really good for older hardware.
For a while after 32 bit ISOs stop being distributed you might be able to cross-compile from source. When compatibility switches about the size of a stored value get ripped out that'll stop.
I switched to antix when Mint stopped 32bit support
@@kousakasan7882 Mint even with xfce desktop isn’t very lightweight though.
@@davidpriestley3268 10 years ago Mint ran great on that laptop. But Mint 2 years ago had gotten too bloated. So I switched to antix
wanna hear an ironic fact? an windows 10 mini os runs way better on an old hardware than all of this linux distros
search: windows 10 mini os or windows 10 delta os
a 20 minute EC video? On old laptops and linux which is what I have been into these past months? Imma need an extra mug of coffee for this treat!
:)
A tip to anyone worried about slow UA-cam playback on an old machine: linux allows you to copy the link of the video you want to watch on a program like VLC or MPV and it will run just fine!
Yup. I wonder how much of the playback issue is the older hardware, and how much of that is due to the overhead of the web browser to get to it...Firefox isn't exactly lightweight anymore. :-/
I love using VLC, I skip all the ads.
It does help significantly but there's only so much it can do on something like this, video decoding is very intensive and something we take for granted. I have an EeePC 900 and can tell you that HD video is not gonna play friendly.
@@VulpisFoxfire - Firefox was never lightweight.
Uhm... how? I've tried copying the link of this video in VLC and SMPlayer, with opening URL option, and it just couldn't start...
puppy linux is the hero old computers need. Love to see it.
I prefer either Lubuntu or Mint Xfce, myself. Gotta love how we have freedom of choice with Linux!
Good stuff. I've got a well manufactured Toshiba that still works from 2005, I did put Linux lite and an ssd in it but these might be worth a look too
This video has just reminded me of how much of my life has been wasted waiting for Windows XP to start up.
But, is XP much lighter and faster on a decent PC if run in a VM? I loaded Windows 10 yesterday in a VM and am now wondering if Windows 7 (32-bit even?!) or even XP would run faster. not sure yet if the software I need will work on such old Windows versions. Any hints for me?
Now, we are waiting for W10 to do its update, 42 minutes was it last time. I just wanted to open an Excel sheet.
Antix ,Bodhi linux and any Puppy spin will do the job! Great video as always!Cheers!
I'm currently using MX Linux on an old Acer Aspire 1. It's not as fast as Puppy Linux but it runs really well. I also replaced Firefox by Falkon on it. The speed increase for internet browsing was dramatically improved.
What a beast, it has more i/O than a modern macbook.
So does my toaster.
Appreciate this video. Especially this day and age. Im working to acquire and refurbish old gear to give to students for remote education.
the tansitions between camera and screen-recorder where on point ! great video.
13:33 - It seems to be rendering correctly, as you've spaced things with just text (so nothing fancy at all there, which would be good for old computers and OSs), the line broke correctly and the text of the menu appears centered as it should. The problem is that that Linux distro doesn't have any of the sans serif fonts you added on the font-family style rule. It would probably work as intended if you added "sans-serif" to the end of that aforementioned rule.
Yes, I am sure you are correct. :)
I love this video and am very eager for your upcoming *upgrading old desktop PC's* playlist .....Enjoyed my sunday night 👍
new sparky linux 20 is unbelivable i have it on my very old laptop and it brought it back to life,thanks for video again
The way you placed that laptop perfectly into the frame pleases my OCD immensely.
:)
I am running Antix 19 on my eeePC 701 of 2008 vintage (4GB of built-in eMMC and I had upgraded the RAM to 1GB). I tried Lubuntu (sluggish) and HaikuOS (nice, but not serious enough, and did not support the webcam).
Thumbs up, the most consistent youtuber when it comes to uploading videos.
Excellent tutorial. I just installed Bionic Pup on my wife's old HP laptop. It originally was Windows 7 but after upgrading to Windows 10 it became practically useless. I'll probably use it to run my CNC machine or 3D printer. First I booted it from a USB drive. After seeing how good the performance was I did the install onto the HDD. The boot loader now gives me a choice of booting Windows or Bionic Pup - very slick!
This sounds like a good result. :)
Booting Bionic Pup into RAM will make your wife’s HP jet powered ! It amazed me the performance I got doing that on a very old Dell Inspiron😃
"oh you wiped XP? i guess because it was out of support?"
"no no not at all"
"why then?"
"to get flood fill, sir. flood fill."
Nice. But do not fear, I took an image of the XP install. :)
@@ExplainingComputers jsejkdisjeidmds
@@ExplainingComputers Old Good Memories
I don't wipe windows, sometimes its hard to find old drivers, or I want XP to run an old piece of software. Better to just put another hard drive in it since they are cheap.
Thanks for a great video with clear explanations.
I tried linux Mint on an old Acer notebook but, it is still struggling.
I'm going to try BionicPup to see what happens.
Watching videos on UA-cam is nice but not the only use for a computer.
I'm now a subscriber to this excellent channel.
What a lovely project - a few months ago, I installed Debian onto this laptop's little brother, the 701SD. Glad to see I'm not the only one who gave this concept a shot!
I have one of these laying around from around the same time. Thanks for sharing!
I've been running Raspbian x86 on my MSI Wind netbook and it works pretty well, although tbh it mostly sits on the shelf gathering dust. :)
Ditto, Raspberry Pi OS for desktop is my go-to distro anymore. Lite, quick and capable. Runs flawlessly on my original Dell Mini 9, IBM Thinkpads, and Lenovo desktop. At its heart is Debian with the awesome RPi desktop.
I installed this "bionic pup 1 " and absolutely love it thx for the point in the right direction in bringing life to a eeepc lying around doing nothing, will continue to follow an share your efforts thanks chris
Great to hear!
@@ExplainingComputers alot of your content is fantasic for myself and community of ham/amateur radio operators use single board computers so keep the content coming thank you and il continue to follow and support your channel
Another great video! I run Lubuntu on my old EeePC 1000HA and find that it runs very well. I keep it on my desk at work, it's useful for helping to diagnose network faults, bring up router configuration pages and whatnot. BionicPup looks very interesting, I'll have to give it a try.
I swear that Mr. Barnett can read minds. This is the third time I had a project and suddenly... BAM! Explaining Computers publishes a video related to my project.
Anyway, Looks like that old computer has the same performance as a Raspberry Pi Zero W, I basically get the same speeds and experience.
We have the same laptop, thanks for the info, we will bring it alive again. 👍🙂🧐
We got several of these EeePCs back in 2008 at my workplace. They have all been retired from their original purpose at this point. However, I still have one of these running in my office. It provides a wireless access point for IT personnel in the area and for certain maintenance purposes. It also serves out a USB label printer on the network. The specifications for ours seem exactly the same except that they have two 8GB SSDs instead of one (and they are black instead of white).
As far as Windows XP went on these computers, my experience is with XP Professional. I found that by the time all the updates that XP eventually got were installed, you ran out of room on the 8GB SSD. You could delete backup files and move the page file to the second drive, but you really had to shoehorn XP with all the updates into these machines. On the ones we had, you could get the most out of the drive space in Linux by using LVM to combine the two drives into one volume.
For clarification, this netbook was very low spec (the nature of netbooks) even when it was released. Athlon64, Pentium D, and Core2 chips (all 64 bit) had come out by this time, and there were 32 bit chips that outperformed these by quite a lot.
I am running Debian 10 (Stable) on this machine, and it works pretty well. I have experimented with others of these netbooks (with identical specs). I have found that any of the 18.04 Ubuntu variations (the last with 32 bit support) are still a bit heavy for this hardware. Debian with a lighter weight desktop environment or window manager (XFCE or lighter) will work better. I have found that running Compton as a compositor actually seems to improve performance a bit, presumably because it shifts some of the processing load from the CPU to the GPU. I still feel confident that BionicPup would be lighter, but Debian 10 easily works better than Lubuntu 18.04 or Zorin OS Lite 15.3.
There are things you can do for better results with UA-cam, like using mpv + youtube_dl. I imagine that lighter browsers and/or forcing h.264 video could help as well.
I notice that the video on the netbook used for your experiments seems to have at least one broken color channel on the display (green, it would appear). These machines tend to have a blue shift if not color calibrated, but not that much of a blue shift. This is usually caused by a cable or connector issue, though that is a pain when it's a laptop/netbook.
I once had 4 IDE HDDs, one SCSI and 2 optical SCSI devices (a CD-RW and a DVD ROM) on my Athlon XP. While those HDDs were small and not the same capacity, I made them dynamic disks and somehow merged together so the OS would see one huge HDD with the capacity equal to the sum of all phisical HDDs. The OS was XP pro. HowI did it? I do not remember but I am sure that I did something in the disk manager after a fresh install of the OS. Maybe you can replicate this and "merge" those small SSDs in one big HDD to have enough space. Also, Asus have a utility (C2D or something that moves "Program Files" folder location from C to D thus freeing C drive for Windows folder)
Thanks for the great video!
Just installed bionicpup32 on my old laptop after trying 5-6 different lightweight distros... Puppy is indeed the best in terms of going easy on all components: cpu, ram, storage :)
I have a lot of old computers, and I wanted to give them to anyone who needs it, and I found this video, Linux is truly a game-changer
Reviving an old hardware. What a fun experience. Thanks Chris.
Zorin OS is very nice to look at. I love how awesome KALI looks. Very polished. And so is Garuda!
I used Puppy Linux on an insanely old IBM Stinkpad until it finally died. Woof!
i did the same with lubuntu.. hardware failure but the os worked
stopped using puppy due to some needs, but still impressive how handy and active still the puppy community
I used Slackware Linux until a computer died of capacitor failure.
I had Puppy on an old Compaq Armada 1750(?) back in the day. Definitely sparks some nostalgia
@@kyria_kous you're saying puppy is lighter and works better for old hardware?
I've basically got that netbook. I loved it back in the day. It was so much handier than a full laptop.
Thanks for showing how the Browsers and UA-cam run on the OS most other people do not show that. Bionic Pup was Amazing in full screen on UA-cam!
Oh, this one really speaks my language. I love using junkers that people throw away.
I got an old Compaq laptop for free on Craigslist, 1.7 Ghz, duel core with 3 gigs ram.
I run MX Linux 19.3 32bit on it, and it runs like a champ!
MX Linux is by far, the absolute best distro I've tried (and I've tested over 60!!). Debian based, fast, light on resources, continued 32bit support, excellent documentation, and friendly, knowledgeable people on their Facebook group.
Other distros that might work well on this specific computer are:
* Q4OS
* antiX
* "Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac" AKA "Debian Buster with Raspberry
Pi Desktop"
Q4OS is likely to run best on this guys laptop in this video. It's super light weight, small, fast and very easy to use even for Windows users.
Same same - serial computer hoarder here!
@@oneszeros1 I've got about 30 or 40 full computer systems (You should see my closet, and my storage unit!!, speakers not included. I wish I could post pictures here!), and something like... 8 or 9 laptops. I fix them up & sell them cheap. (Usually with Windows 10, but I offer basic linux installs too.
I've got a few Windows XP era computers & laptops that are somewhat in this computers hardware range.
I could install Windows XP on them & sell them for "Retro Gaming Computers" but I want to install Q4OS on, and then see if I can install some Pre-school software on them for children. Then donate them to families that can't afford a basic system.
(I really don't like the look of Puppy Linux, and I don't know how to make major desktop changes... See? I'm still a n00b! LOL!)
It's not much, but... It will get them online, they can browse the web, do emails, write office documents, maybe listen to music & watch a DVD, and / or the child of the family has software to help keep them busy and learning. :)
@@mikestrickland2755 I'm beaten!!! Not quite on that level here but that is a very noble idea and cause you have in mind there so ... 👍
@@oneszeros1 I've got 40 netbooks in a drawer under my bed! Anybody want one?
Christopher, if you would use Lynx (terminal browser) and you would download the videos and play those in vlc/mpc then you could probably get much more out of that laptop. Something for a future video.
It used to be really easy to stream youtube vids directly in vlc, That's what I would do for my old t43 and it cut memory usage a lot. Doing so has given me trouble lately and I don't know if that is my fault, the machine, or something youtube has changed. If you can get it to work I'd recommend it.
@@enzoloconte553 UA-cam had some changes, youtube-dl also broke in the past but it has been working without problems if you keep using the latest version.
Oh man, I remember when these tiny Eee PC netbooks were all the craze around here. I've formatted and installed Windows XP on so many of these back in the day for my clients. Always had trouble dealing with the software package to install vs. the available storage. Always had to make some compromises and leave out some basic necessary program and a lot of the owners simply wouldn't understand, let alone accept, that some program they wanted would not be installed because there wasn't enough available storage. Fun times. lol
Windows 8 10 updates bricked many of the X86 nrtbooks, a damn shame and should have been a class action lawsuit.
those Eee PC targeted Students and they were priced around $200 and below
i love this video, this give me a chance to revive a old netbook... you are amazing... thank you.
This video is still quite informative. I've been on a kick lately of getting old Eee PCs and bringing them back to life. They were so small, but chonky. I love the form factor. You can add the 32 bit Debian 12 to the list. Debian's installer is much easier to use, now, and getting an XFCE install going takes no time at all.
Eee PC were so awesome. I used one for years and carried it around everywhere before smartphones.
Those were the days.
Netbooks, a thing that filled a small niche before the smartphones took over - email and browser in a small lightweight format for on the go.
I still use my old Samsung NB30 every now and then. I use Lubuntu on it but now I'll look at Bionic Pup.
Pity the screen sucks on them, far too small for any serious work.
I have what was probably the last Lenovo netbook (2 GB ram) and I run Elive on it. A little slow at times, but since it's a backup computer I don't mind. I remember these netbooks were quite popular at the school I taught in, especially among IB students.
With a properly configured mpv player, these machines could still be used to watch UA-cam.
Indeed, browsers are really inefficient video players. I use mpv for all my youtube needs even on modern machines, because I prefer the battery to last longer than the video I'm watching.
Puppy Linux works wonders, I learned a lot about Linux form this distro. Suggested it so many people with old hardware.
The cool thing is that it's all in the flash drive and only uses the RAM,so it leaves no trace on the HDD if anonymity is required.Interesting how it updates the software on the flash drive too.
@@tolrem yea exactly
plus it supports the dual boot option
Installed Lubuntu in my old laptop an now works great! Thanks a lot!!
Great to hear!
2:49 Refreshed old good days of windows xp 😍 I miss those
Missing those days so much ❤
Such a joyful review 😊 18:09 "you can do it!"
From all of these, Zorin OS is my favorite due to it's design.
I have a notebook with windows (4GB ram, 500GB HD and core i3) that's very unresponsive... maybe linux will improve it's capabilities
An i3 with 4 GB is plenty for running full 64-bit Linux Mint and probably full Zorin as well, but you will want an SSD.
Every time I hear Eee PC, I'm reminded by Dank Pods saying "Eeeeeeeee Peeee Ceeee~"
Nice
yep epic u watch dankpods
I know.
I downloaded Bionic pup today and after watching your video I am glad I made that choice. Thank you.
This is great to hear!
another reason I like this channel! Great job. Love learning computing.
“Linux can run on a toaster.”
Challenge accepted!!!
Underrated comment
Most toasters with an embedded computer already run Linux :p
But can it run Doom
@@ThePiGuy24 But that toaster can’t show me this video. So...
@@sannidhyabalkote9536 Every time I use my toaster the bread is doomed, does that count? :P
You must've been reading my mind, Chris. I have literally just dug my Dad's PC out for a freshen-up (still runs XP) and can't run Windows 10. Unfortunately Linux Mint Cinnamon is a bit slow, so was wondering about a lighter flavour of Linux. Your vid has helped me right out.
A belated Happy New Year and I look forward to many more videos. Thanks :D
You forgot about AntiX Linux.😭😭
It's really an ideal distro for old hardware.
And it's the only that runs with processor without SSE protocol
yea AntiX or MX is good on small footprint machines.
@@cejannuzi I agree! It's a journey only to change password in wifi settings, but it's the only Linux distro that is supported by my old potato pc.
Take a look at Q4OS as well maybe.
@@cejannuzi works flawlessly for me
I like this video, giving new live to old laptops is awesome.
my 40-year-old uncle has been fixing computer and laptop tech since 2021, I might show this video to him and explain why there is Linux, which is way better in performance than Windows, but there are lightweight Windows versions from my country...
thank you, Chris!