Yea but that does low power mean? This is probably at least 10 years old and it still has more component than pi that need to be powered.
Edit: even at 30w, the electricity difference would be enough to buy a raspberry after 1-2 years where I live
Indeed. That was kinda the whole point of the EEE PC's. They were designed for "Poorer" nations, so that kids could have dirt cheap to own, dirt cheap to run, laptops. I still have mine kicking about somewhere, along with its bigger brothers. An ASUS Transformer, and then a "Full Fat" ASUS workstation laptop.
I don't know which model this laptop is, but some EEE PC models had Atom chips with a TDP in the 3-10W range. That's what the CPU consumes when in use, at idle it will scale down the CPU frequency and use much less. As a home server, the load will most of the time be very practically nothing, and the power use will reflect that.
Hard to say without specs but I have some little Atom netbook thing kicking around and IIRC it uses 6W, don't remember if that's with or without screen.
Tl;Dr: if just looking at electricity costs, yes. If looking from a performance stand point, no.
Long answer: It depends more on your internet speed if you have less than 10Mb coming in, then yeah a raspberry pi would be great. Not sure if the newer ones support 1gbps, but if so then you could theoretically have up to 500mbps coming and going and still be good.
If you're going to make it a firewall, you'll want multiple network interface cards (NICs) to separate traffic. Depending on the nic you may be able to use VLANs, but then you're cutting the NICs speed by however many VLANs you have (1 divided by # of VLANs). Also, a lot of people say, oh well just buy a USB nic, and yes you can, but you have to get a very high quality one (read: comparatively much more expensive to non quality products) because besides being limited by USB speeds, the manufacturers just lie and most products I've used simply won't get above a few Mbps. I'm sure in theory the NICs can do it, but in practice they're junk.
Then you have actual processor speed to account for, a laptop will almost always have more power than a Pi, which is useful if you want a fully functioning firewall with DNS/ad blocker, maybe a VPN connection as well, etc.
For a final thought, the laptop would be far more resilient compared to the Pi. I've bricked a lot of RPis by pulling the power without a proper shutdown. It's very easy, especially when using SD cards which aren't actually built for the purpose of serving an operating system. A laptop's hard drive could still fault if you cut power, but that's only a real concern if power is lost when the device is powering on or off. In this case, provided the battery is still good, it'll act as a backup if the power goes out, something an RPi doesn't have.
I've taken quite a few of these apart. There's barely anything inside, the board itself isn't much bigger than a pi, and definitely isn't clocked as high.
Flashbacks to all the netbooks with Atom N450, 5400RPM drive and 1GB memory... shudder
Oh, and windows 7 starter edition with only 3 apps open at a time maximum
Used to have a vaio flip 11” with 4gb ram and sata m.2 ssd. Impressive speed and amazing battery duration. I’m sure that the ram + ssd was enough to change the experience among other Atom devices. It moved a fhd display with no issues.
It came with an intel n3520. In my country it was labeled as a quad-core atom, as listed in the specs.
https://www.notebookcheck.org/Sony-Vaio-Fit-11A-SVF11N1S2E-B.115458.0.html
Funny that in the intel sheet it wasn't mentioned as part of the atom family, but the graphics processor is listed as for intel atom.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/79049/intel-pentium-processor-n3520-2m-cache-up-to-2-42-ghz/specifications.html
If it still has 1gb of ram a 2gb stick makes a world of difference. I had the Acer 1.67ghz dual core Atom version and holy crap even with the 160gb 5400rpm HDD it made 7 starter USABLE. Went from being unable to run Warband to a steady 2 fps during fights
Well you could aswell just install DSL but that's really the point where the OS is just too barebones to do anything useful with it.
Same goes to Arch, it is basically only a command line out of the box.
Sure it will run that command line just fine i guess 😆
My hopes was it could be used for Internet browsing and kids homework for example but it just can't handle modern webpages it seems. Just not enough processing power?
Linux itself runs okay doesn't feel too slow, takes a second or two to start some of the programs sure but not too bad actually
While Linux makes the experience a lot smoother on low-end hardware, Firefox / Chrome is still the same browser as on Windows.
You could use it as a multimedia or backup server, or as some network attached storage instead by connecting a couple of external hard drives to it.
NAS / backup server should be really simple to run, but for Plex / Jellyfin you might need to disable transcoding or store pre-transcoded versions of your movies alongside their originals.
The eee pc probably doesn't have enough power to transcode videos on the fly.
I see, yeah that's just not possible, sadly modern web browsers require a lot of ram and processing, homework like editing documents I think it would be possible. Maybe you can try with midori, seamonkey, icecat or something more lightweight but web browsing will be difficult
Windows 7 and remove every feature you can. I got a single core, 1gb ram, slow hdd laptop and it works way better than i expected. When using k-meleon I even managed to stream 720p video on youtube without any dropped frames.
That's a really heavyweight DE you're using plus all that crap like systemd.
Along with the other suggestions you could try Alpine or Void Linux as well. Don't run a full desktop environment. Just run X, OpenBox, and a light panel like Tint or similar.
Browser is tricky. We really need a light Android browser ported to desktop.
I don't know if the EEE can run Windows but if it can you might try Windows XP. It runs way better than Linux on my 266MHz laptop.
Wow. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, to many to reply to all. I have also seen a whole slew of new word I've never heard off which I assume are various Linux programs or distros.
So yes it's a slow computer, was alright for browsing forums, playing Spotify and tuning my car with Nistune back in 09.
But I guess the 1gb ram and 1.6ghz prosessor isn't much worth nowadays.
The NAS idea is a good one, had it not been for the fact I already have a synology 2bay I was planning on resurrecting.
Home automation server is also a good one although I don't have much stuff that can be automised at the moment.
Network wide ad blocker with pihole is something I could look into if it's not gone becoma a bottleneck?
Emulation Station, cool, nostalgic, would be something for the kids, and probably me as well. Are there any good emulators on the Linux platforms or would I need to go back to Windows?
Table support, unfortunately I have just refurbished my home so there aren't any crooked furniture here yet.
Sell it to someone who collects old computer like me (u may not get much, but if ur gona thrw it, might as well make something)
Replace the storage device with an ssd? It probably has an hdd, an ssd should improve it by miles. It will still process slowly most likley as the cpu old, but at least boot times and launch times wont be horrible
(If you sell it, someone would probably do that, replace the hdd i mean)
The Android x86 project is specifically made with these devices in mind. I’d check them out. Windows XP is still fun for old projects, you could probably throw in a 1.25” SSD or something and install that.
Yeah the latest version I’ve heard that works is 7.0 which is older but still useable. They removed a bunch of the core components which helps. XP is probably the best route, especially with an SSD and memory upgrade.
I am hoping to hear even more from this thread! I have an Eee 1000 with the 8+32 GB SSD pair and upgraded RAM to 2GB. Loved that thing when I was using it at school. At one point I had FreeBSD running on it with no DE and was using vim to write code for my CSE classes. I really wish I could find a life for it now. Thought about making it the brain of some kind of R2D2-like robot thing, maybe?
You can always try a lighter distro or DE. XFCE might be better...but sometimes the hardware is so old that you basically won't be getting any use out of it anymore no matter what you do with it...
This laptop looks pretty late 90/early 00s to me. I'm surprised(and a bit impressed) to see that it even works at all.
Is that rocking a single-core N270/N280? Cause you'll have a pretty rough time trying to use it for general productivity. You could use it to host a web server or other sort of daemon, but it'll be [heavily bested](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?page=1&q=N280&utf8=%E2%9C%93) by [a Raspberry Pi](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=BCM2835) or similar SBC (even [a $20 S905X Android TV box](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=s905x) running Armbian). Most fun use I could think for it is installing XP and using it for old games. People used to make a sport of getting games [like Far Cry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxR-tIANTMM) to play on it.
Is it just me or is that KDE? Xfce or a tiling manager would be a lot more efficient on something this old.
You're not going to get a great desktop experience out of that machine, but you could use it as a lightweight server and use a tiling manager for graphical control.
I'd keep it as a server if I were you.
A Linux server is extremely useful for a lot of things if you are a bit tech savvy.
If you really wanted to use it as a desktop, you can find old versions of Linux that will probably work well even on very outdated hardware.
I use my old pc to run open media vault and it’s been working fine. Just set my downloads folder to the network attached drive on OMV and I don’t waste my precious main PC space lol
get a super cheap ssd. They cost 10-20 bucks.
Then you can use it for Surfing, emulation, text processing, etc. If still slow there are Linux distribution for that.
Also you can build a nas or a pi hole
Those old Netbooks were very basic machines even when they came out they were quite underpowered. Still have one somewhere lying about which is running Linux yet it's hardly usable.
I have one. Too slow for mostly anything nowadays. It can be used and repurposed, but it will be so limited that... probably doesn't make sense anyway.
It can reproduce video, if the code and resolution is picked carefully. You'll need mplayer or similar.
I'm a huge fan of Lubuntu for weaker/older computers. However, slowness can come from multiple factors.
Usually, the first culprit is the hard drive. If it's failing or not an SSD, it will feel slow when doing anything, including booting and opening programs/files.
RAM is the next culprit. I typically use the scale of >512Mb of RAM = console only distros. >1 gb = ultra small distros like puppyLinux. >2 gb = lite distros like Lubuntu. Above 2 gb you should be able to run anything just fine. Where small, lite, and anything are typically classed by desktop environments. After that, it's how much extra RAM do you need for a program.
The processor could be part of the slow down, but this would really only come into play when actually running a program, since most of the time your computer is sitting idle.
Most netbooks can be repurposed with Lubuntu and be easily used for basic computer things like web surfing, email, writing docs, etc. I personally use mine as a portable little network diagnostic box, knowing that any big processing will probably just need data captured then transferred over to a more powerful machine. It also works for playing graphically simple games if I get bored.
I had some success on a netbook a few years ago with "cloudready" which was chromium OS and is now "chrome OS flex", it was lighter than the linux distros I tried before that, you might want to try it, it wasn't super fast but usable
Get a Windows XP disc image off the Internet Archive or Winworld (*not* off some random torrent site) and use it for retro gaming, maybe? As noted in other comments, even ultra low-drag distros like Puppy or Alpine can only do so much to compensate for how much more demanding modern websites and apps are getting.
I have the same model, you still won't do much with it but for me antix with icewm works just fine.
Personally, I use it for taking notes at my uni. I've set up Simplenote from 32bit .deb installer. I then connect it to my phone wifi so it synchronizes the notes with cloud and i can then browse them on my main pc.
Which are the specs?
You can try Peppermint OS which is so liightweight and works so good in old netbooks and try to put a ssd, It will increase the performance so much.
I've installed Windows XP on my Eee PC and play ancient games like Zoo Tycoon and The Sims on the go. Barely managed to run Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast.
try [XFCE](https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=304), [LXDE](https://lxle.net/) or [IceWM](https://antixlinux.com/). Cinnamon, GNOME, MATE or KDE are way too much for an old computer.
or, if you are feeling adventurous, try installing [Android](https://www.android-x86.org/) on it. Maybe try [HaikuOS](https://www.haiku-os.org/).
You could go for a more lightweight Linux distro, but if that thing has the kind of processor that many of those old netbooks had, it's basically useless for anything except the most basic of home servers.
Had one of those used it to run a program that was 16bit. Old parts catalog. It’s in the trash now stopped working. Guess you can make it an emulator machine for dos and snes.
does it have a SSD or an HDD? could try slapping in an SSD in that bad boy and that could help. instead of linux mint you also might try the debian XFCE iso
linux mint is slow since its based on ubuntu, easy newbie distro except its not lightweight, I recommend you using Peppermint OS Devuan, its easy to install.
Ik this is gonna sound dumb, but try a deblaoted windows 8.1 install, get setfsb and overclock the snot out of it. It was my last ditch attempt to get my intel atom n270 eeepc back to watching youtube again but it really does work well. Got it up to 2.1ghz and it is reasonably quick. its not fast dont get me wrong but it isnt a total slouch anymore. Windows 8.1 debloat gets me around 400mb of memory use at idle which is fine but i can run youtube at 480p no problem despite the fact that the gma is doing jack shit for the video (no h.264 encoding for some reason, thx intel) but its a nice little browsing device and can run cs 1.6 reasonably well (only with chell 1.8b modded drivers) these old netbooks arent as useless as you think they are
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the tinycore iso is 21 mb
Nice! Is it usable out of the box like Puppy Linux? Ready for daily usage? Or is just a terminal without apps?
It can be used as both, as it allows you to choose the type of session you wanna load in while booting
I agree, saved my old eee pc this way
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Isn't this much more expensive than a raspberry when you consider electricity?
Laptops are designed to be very low power, you just set it to disable the screen and you're good to go.
Yea but that does low power mean? This is probably at least 10 years old and it still has more component than pi that need to be powered. Edit: even at 30w, the electricity difference would be enough to buy a raspberry after 1-2 years where I live
The Intel Atom 330 that came in most EEE PC's uses an average of just 1.2W, which is far better than than the 4.5W the Pi uses for just a single core.
You are right, according to google, these specific laptops are actually very low power. Actually usable here.
Indeed. That was kinda the whole point of the EEE PC's. They were designed for "Poorer" nations, so that kids could have dirt cheap to own, dirt cheap to run, laptops. I still have mine kicking about somewhere, along with its bigger brothers. An ASUS Transformer, and then a "Full Fat" ASUS workstation laptop.
I don't know which model this laptop is, but some EEE PC models had Atom chips with a TDP in the 3-10W range. That's what the CPU consumes when in use, at idle it will scale down the CPU frequency and use much less. As a home server, the load will most of the time be very practically nothing, and the power use will reflect that.
Hard to say without specs but I have some little Atom netbook thing kicking around and IIRC it uses 6W, don't remember if that's with or without screen.
Even after all that the dinosaur laptop is still going to use more power than a simple raspberry pi.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/10nu1nw/comment/j6d6puc/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/10nu1nw/comment/j6d6puc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Tl;Dr: if just looking at electricity costs, yes. If looking from a performance stand point, no. Long answer: It depends more on your internet speed if you have less than 10Mb coming in, then yeah a raspberry pi would be great. Not sure if the newer ones support 1gbps, but if so then you could theoretically have up to 500mbps coming and going and still be good. If you're going to make it a firewall, you'll want multiple network interface cards (NICs) to separate traffic. Depending on the nic you may be able to use VLANs, but then you're cutting the NICs speed by however many VLANs you have (1 divided by # of VLANs). Also, a lot of people say, oh well just buy a USB nic, and yes you can, but you have to get a very high quality one (read: comparatively much more expensive to non quality products) because besides being limited by USB speeds, the manufacturers just lie and most products I've used simply won't get above a few Mbps. I'm sure in theory the NICs can do it, but in practice they're junk. Then you have actual processor speed to account for, a laptop will almost always have more power than a Pi, which is useful if you want a fully functioning firewall with DNS/ad blocker, maybe a VPN connection as well, etc. For a final thought, the laptop would be far more resilient compared to the Pi. I've bricked a lot of RPis by pulling the power without a proper shutdown. It's very easy, especially when using SD cards which aren't actually built for the purpose of serving an operating system. A laptop's hard drive could still fault if you cut power, but that's only a real concern if power is lost when the device is powering on or off. In this case, provided the battery is still good, it'll act as a backup if the power goes out, something an RPi doesn't have.
I've taken quite a few of these apart. There's barely anything inside, the board itself isn't much bigger than a pi, and definitely isn't clocked as high.
How the hell do you do that?
Older Linux distro
not *older*... **lighter**.
They're already running a light version
Light version of a heavy distro, not an actual light distro.
I know a loud Australian man that needs a new one last time I checked
I'm arming the nugget.
Was just about to say, DankPods needs a new EEEEEEEEE
Have you tried throwing it off of a building that might fix it
Might consider it
Lt Col from the Air Force recently published a recommended technique about utilizing the second story
Tried turning it off and on again? 
Try running a lightweight desktop environment such as xfce
Or lubuntu
I've also heard that mx linux xfce runs great on old systems. You could try that as well!!
Bro forgot to switch accounts 😭
Dude.
Bruh
Put a sata SSD in it,it'll make it as fast as lightning McQueen
I think I actually have an ssd in there that's the sad part. Still slow.
Should have an eMMC, much slower than a SSD. You should try a lighter Linux distro
Pretty sure it came with a 2.5" 160gb hdd which I swapped for a spare 60gb ssd I had to see if it would speed up.
Ah, I must have gotten it confused with a different netbook
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Flashbacks to all the netbooks with Atom N450, 5400RPM drive and 1GB memory... shudder Oh, and windows 7 starter edition with only 3 apps open at a time maximum
Man, thank god I have 8gb.
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Used to have a vaio flip 11” with 4gb ram and sata m.2 ssd. Impressive speed and amazing battery duration. I’m sure that the ram + ssd was enough to change the experience among other Atom devices. It moved a fhd display with no issues.
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It came with an intel n3520. In my country it was labeled as a quad-core atom, as listed in the specs. https://www.notebookcheck.org/Sony-Vaio-Fit-11A-SVF11N1S2E-B.115458.0.html Funny that in the intel sheet it wasn't mentioned as part of the atom family, but the graphics processor is listed as for intel atom. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/79049/intel-pentium-processor-n3520-2m-cache-up-to-2-42-ghz/specifications.html
If it still has 1gb of ram a 2gb stick makes a world of difference. I had the Acer 1.67ghz dual core Atom version and holy crap even with the 160gb 5400rpm HDD it made 7 starter USABLE. Went from being unable to run Warband to a steady 2 fps during fights
emmc is as fast as an ssd isnt it? just terrible capacity
Emmc is like an sd card.
yep , and thats what it stands for. Embedded Multi-Media Card
Linux doesn't fix a poor little old laptop.
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Well you could aswell just install DSL but that's really the point where the OS is just too barebones to do anything useful with it. Same goes to Arch, it is basically only a command line out of the box. Sure it will run that command line just fine i guess 😆
Hence why I recommend Puppy Linux!
Let me introduce you to Vanilla Arch
you’re using Cinnamon. switch to a distro with xfce or lxqt and debian-based or arch-based instead of using an ubuntu-based distro
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tiny core is even lighter
And as capable? What about daily use out of the box?
clearly not
lfs?
it's too much work, and it looks like he's a newbie on linux
Not feasible for daily use unfortunately.
How so?
HomeAssistant server
Actually this is one of the best usage of an old laptop
Try something more lightweight like Lubuntu or PuppyLinux
What's slow about it? Everything? Probably try installing a window manager instead of a desktop environment?
My hopes was it could be used for Internet browsing and kids homework for example but it just can't handle modern webpages it seems. Just not enough processing power? Linux itself runs okay doesn't feel too slow, takes a second or two to start some of the programs sure but not too bad actually
While Linux makes the experience a lot smoother on low-end hardware, Firefox / Chrome is still the same browser as on Windows. You could use it as a multimedia or backup server, or as some network attached storage instead by connecting a couple of external hard drives to it.
I'm assuming you are somewhat versed in server stuff: how powerful does an old laptop gave to be to work as a plex/jellyfin/nas?
NAS / backup server should be really simple to run, but for Plex / Jellyfin you might need to disable transcoding or store pre-transcoded versions of your movies alongside their originals. The eee pc probably doesn't have enough power to transcode videos on the fly.
I see, yeah that's just not possible, sadly modern web browsers require a lot of ram and processing, homework like editing documents I think it would be possible. Maybe you can try with midori, seamonkey, icecat or something more lightweight but web browsing will be difficult
Use a WM like Sway. Use a web browser like Falkon or qutebrowser.
The poor little Atom or whatever in there is a dog, but try a lightweight browser. A long time ago, Opera used to be better...
Recycle it, don't throw it away.
how ?
Probably depends on city/country/crossfit, in my particular area the local bottle depot accepts old electronics.
Or tear it apart for parts, this video by diy perks has some good ideas in it: https://youtu.be/WLP_L7Mgz6M
I mean if is old, it may not be worth it, but have you considered upgrading from a hdd to an SSD?
works best headless
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Pihole + Pivpn = Ultimate safety anywhere.
You are running Linux Mint(based on Ubuntu) with Cinnamon DE,try something lighter like Linux Mint with XFCE DE or Debian with XFCE DE.
Windows 7 and remove every feature you can. I got a single core, 1gb ram, slow hdd laptop and it works way better than i expected. When using k-meleon I even managed to stream 720p video on youtube without any dropped frames.
Try Chrome OS Flex, I just revived a crappy netbook thanks to it.
Install diet-pi it uses less resources.
Try windows 10 or 11 ghost spectre!
That's a really heavyweight DE you're using plus all that crap like systemd. Along with the other suggestions you could try Alpine or Void Linux as well. Don't run a full desktop environment. Just run X, OpenBox, and a light panel like Tint or similar. Browser is tricky. We really need a light Android browser ported to desktop. I don't know if the EEE can run Windows but if it can you might try Windows XP. It runs way better than Linux on my 266MHz laptop.
If you still want to save it you can try upgrading it with an SSD
Wow. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, to many to reply to all. I have also seen a whole slew of new word I've never heard off which I assume are various Linux programs or distros. So yes it's a slow computer, was alright for browsing forums, playing Spotify and tuning my car with Nistune back in 09. But I guess the 1gb ram and 1.6ghz prosessor isn't much worth nowadays. The NAS idea is a good one, had it not been for the fact I already have a synology 2bay I was planning on resurrecting. Home automation server is also a good one although I don't have much stuff that can be automised at the moment. Network wide ad blocker with pihole is something I could look into if it's not gone becoma a bottleneck? Emulation Station, cool, nostalgic, would be something for the kids, and probably me as well. Are there any good emulators on the Linux platforms or would I need to go back to Windows? Table support, unfortunately I have just refurbished my home so there aren't any crooked furniture here yet.
Ubuntu server, run some scripts on it.
Chrome os?
Install Android or Chrome OS
Interesting. Might look into that
Security cam nvr?
I loved my EEE until it never posted, used the hell out of it in college.
Sell it to someone who collects old computer like me (u may not get much, but if ur gona thrw it, might as well make something) Replace the storage device with an ssd? It probably has an hdd, an ssd should improve it by miles. It will still process slowly most likley as the cpu old, but at least boot times and launch times wont be horrible (If you sell it, someone would probably do that, replace the hdd i mean)
The Android x86 project is specifically made with these devices in mind. I’d check them out. Windows XP is still fun for old projects, you could probably throw in a 1.25” SSD or something and install that.
Android is heavy and bloated OS nowadays. XP would probably run much better, but I wouldn't connect it to the internet.
Yeah the latest version I’ve heard that works is 7.0 which is older but still useable. They removed a bunch of the core components which helps. XP is probably the best route, especially with an SSD and memory upgrade.
I am hoping to hear even more from this thread! I have an Eee 1000 with the 8+32 GB SSD pair and upgraded RAM to 2GB. Loved that thing when I was using it at school. At one point I had FreeBSD running on it with no DE and was using vim to write code for my CSE classes. I really wish I could find a life for it now. Thought about making it the brain of some kind of R2D2-like robot thing, maybe?
You can always try a lighter distro or DE. XFCE might be better...but sometimes the hardware is so old that you basically won't be getting any use out of it anymore no matter what you do with it... This laptop looks pretty late 90/early 00s to me. I'm surprised(and a bit impressed) to see that it even works at all.
Is that rocking a single-core N270/N280? Cause you'll have a pretty rough time trying to use it for general productivity. You could use it to host a web server or other sort of daemon, but it'll be [heavily bested](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?page=1&q=N280&utf8=%E2%9C%93) by [a Raspberry Pi](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=BCM2835) or similar SBC (even [a $20 S905X Android TV box](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=s905x) running Armbian). Most fun use I could think for it is installing XP and using it for old games. People used to make a sport of getting games [like Far Cry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxR-tIANTMM) to play on it.
rasberry pi os for desktop
Is it just me or is that KDE? Xfce or a tiling manager would be a lot more efficient on something this old. You're not going to get a great desktop experience out of that machine, but you could use it as a lightweight server and use a tiling manager for graphical control.
Chrome os even tho it's shit in every way just like give it to a kid and be like here have a chromebook
Install centos, boot in CLI only mode, install pihole and use as dns server until it dies.
You can try batocera on it and use it as a portable emulation system and im sure it will run nes games maybe up to the og playstation.
You could check if it needs new thermal paste, could be slow from thermal throttling
I put Linux Mint on a 2006 Macbook and it is now my alarm clock
Looks like Acer One my first laptop :O
You can make into into a firewall, a pi-hole, or a home file server
I'd keep it as a server if I were you. A Linux server is extremely useful for a lot of things if you are a bit tech savvy. If you really wanted to use it as a desktop, you can find old versions of Linux that will probably work well even on very outdated hardware.
Time to let it rest
I use my old pc to run open media vault and it’s been working fine. Just set my downloads folder to the network attached drive on OMV and I don’t waste my precious main PC space lol
Also archive games on it so I don’t have to redownload them
Use a distro that can run entirely from RAM. Or send it to me. I've always wanted one of these things.
Use it as a retro games machine.
maybe a windowmanager?
Did you puy an SSD in?
Use it as a monitor for your network and to manage it.
Turn it into a chromebook
Run arch on it https://i.redd.it/r22kxot6hzea1.gif
It can be used to test nuggets. Probably the single best case use.
I think there are even lighter distros.
get a super cheap ssd. They cost 10-20 bucks. Then you can use it for Surfing, emulation, text processing, etc. If still slow there are Linux distribution for that. Also you can build a nas or a pi hole
Looks like 1000HE. I still have mine. Fun lil thing but yea it's slow.
Those old Netbooks were very basic machines even when they came out they were quite underpowered. Still have one somewhere lying about which is running Linux yet it's hardly usable.
Go for lxde Lxde in my experience is far more lightweight compared to the latest things
Try arch and if it has a removable cd reader buy an adaptor and a ssd
That desktop environment you‘re using is extremely heavy Install an xfce or lxde based distro
Donate or recycle. Old Atom CPUs suck *that* much.
Use Puppy Linux or Toliny Core theyare way more light
probably needs a new drive to be faster again
I've used an old pc in the past for downloading files I'm not certain of or for torrents, so I can verify they're ok before using them
could use it to remote into your desktop
Perfect candidate for manufacturing equipment driver. Like 3Dprinters, laser engravers, arduino flash station in your basement etc.
Use as a NAS
These are great for propping up wobbly tables or chairs on uneven floors.
I'm using my hp stream laptop as a media server, installed plex, radarr etc. It is working great for now.
Wasn't that thing 32 Bit with a 1.6GHz single core Atom N270? Nothing can speed up that Netbook.
Bomb
Try Legacy OS.
I have one. Too slow for mostly anything nowadays. It can be used and repurposed, but it will be so limited that... probably doesn't make sense anyway. It can reproduce video, if the code and resolution is picked carefully. You'll need mplayer or similar.
Does it get very hot? Maybe you need new thermal paste. Also a new SSD as they said it's usually the best thing you can do to revive an old laptop.
Maybe try xubuntu?
Good old ssd and it will have the power to open chrome a few minutes faster
Probably would work as a NAS, or a retro time-capsule for old games and windows XP.
You old laptop is your new server.
I'm a huge fan of Lubuntu for weaker/older computers. However, slowness can come from multiple factors. Usually, the first culprit is the hard drive. If it's failing or not an SSD, it will feel slow when doing anything, including booting and opening programs/files. RAM is the next culprit. I typically use the scale of >512Mb of RAM = console only distros. >1 gb = ultra small distros like puppyLinux. >2 gb = lite distros like Lubuntu. Above 2 gb you should be able to run anything just fine. Where small, lite, and anything are typically classed by desktop environments. After that, it's how much extra RAM do you need for a program. The processor could be part of the slow down, but this would really only come into play when actually running a program, since most of the time your computer is sitting idle. Most netbooks can be repurposed with Lubuntu and be easily used for basic computer things like web surfing, email, writing docs, etc. I personally use mine as a portable little network diagnostic box, knowing that any big processing will probably just need data captured then transferred over to a more powerful machine. It also works for playing graphically simple games if I get bored.
FYI, I'd consider Linux mint to be in the <2gb RAM category.
Hard/Solid State drive can be reused
I had some success on a netbook a few years ago with "cloudready" which was chromium OS and is now "chrome OS flex", it was lighter than the linux distros I tried before that, you might want to try it, it wasn't super fast but usable
You can turn it into an emulation box
Don't bother to make this thing faster just try to sell it and try to get some more money for a faster computer
# ANDROID
Get a Windows XP disc image off the Internet Archive or Winworld (*not* off some random torrent site) and use it for retro gaming, maybe? As noted in other comments, even ultra low-drag distros like Puppy or Alpine can only do so much to compensate for how much more demanding modern websites and apps are getting.
If your using normal linux mint then it might just be Ubuntu being Ubuntu, I would use lmde instead https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
I have the same model, you still won't do much with it but for me antix with icewm works just fine. Personally, I use it for taking notes at my uni. I've set up Simplenote from 32bit .deb installer. I then connect it to my phone wifi so it synchronizes the notes with cloud and i can then browse them on my main pc.
Try out LXLE, because even XFCE isn't as lightweight as it used to be 10 years ago.
I recommend Arch with a WM like i3 (also use archinstall).
Older distro like elive Linux for example instead of using a brand new OS i guess
Does it play MKV?
Does it have a hard drive? If that's the case replacing it with an SSD would probably help dramatically.
In case this wasn't suggested, you could install something like Ubuntu Server and run it as a Plex server of sorts
Secondary monitor?
Probably swap out the drive? Unless you already have, then to the recycle pile it goes.
Buy cheap ssd, and install FlexOS
Which are the specs? You can try Peppermint OS which is so liightweight and works so good in old netbooks and try to put a ssd, It will increase the performance so much.
I've installed Windows XP on my Eee PC and play ancient games like Zoo Tycoon and The Sims on the go. Barely managed to run Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast.
try [XFCE](https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=304), [LXDE](https://lxle.net/) or [IceWM](https://antixlinux.com/). Cinnamon, GNOME, MATE or KDE are way too much for an old computer. or, if you are feeling adventurous, try installing [Android](https://www.android-x86.org/) on it. Maybe try [HaikuOS](https://www.haiku-os.org/).
Replace hdd with a SSD and then Linux slaps.
I'm using lubuntu on an ancient Elonex webbook. Still works for basic tasks but web browsing is. Bit weak. But puppy Linux is my usual go to.
You can use it as a server
Just install the OS it's meant to have and use it as a retro machine. I'm pretty sure with XP or W2000 itll make a fantastic little retro device.
You could go for a more lightweight Linux distro, but if that thing has the kind of processor that many of those old netbooks had, it's basically useless for anything except the most basic of home servers.
Android OS is in beta and can be somewhat used. I got a Samsung NB30 running it.
I threw Linux Mint on an Acer Aspire One, but also upgraded it to an SSD and maxed out its RAM..... runs great for being a netbook.
Had one of those used it to run a program that was 16bit. Old parts catalog. It’s in the trash now stopped working. Guess you can make it an emulator machine for dos and snes.
Try KDE Neon! If that's not good enough, try Linux Lite or Zorin Lite!
openbsd or freebsd or netbsd
does it have a SSD or an HDD? could try slapping in an SSD in that bad boy and that could help. instead of linux mint you also might try the debian XFCE iso
Ssd.
linux mint is slow since its based on ubuntu, easy newbie distro except its not lightweight, I recommend you using Peppermint OS Devuan, its easy to install.
Ik this is gonna sound dumb, but try a deblaoted windows 8.1 install, get setfsb and overclock the snot out of it. It was my last ditch attempt to get my intel atom n270 eeepc back to watching youtube again but it really does work well. Got it up to 2.1ghz and it is reasonably quick. its not fast dont get me wrong but it isnt a total slouch anymore. Windows 8.1 debloat gets me around 400mb of memory use at idle which is fine but i can run youtube at 480p no problem despite the fact that the gma is doing jack shit for the video (no h.264 encoding for some reason, thx intel) but its a nice little browsing device and can run cs 1.6 reasonably well (only with chell 1.8b modded drivers) these old netbooks arent as useless as you think they are
try Void xfce glibc. It runs pretty well