Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I’d love some insight from people around.
Tiny Core
This is the answer. Tiny Core is absolute best for old hardware as it gets running upto speed quickly takes very little resources and you can see what kind of resources it consumes and can add things to it to make it useful.
Doesn’t Tiny Core load into RAM? With 512 MB that could be a problem. There are many versions of Puppy Linux. I think they load into RAM also. I would try MX Linux and see if that worked. Expanding the amount of RAM would be helpful, but it is not worth spending money on that machine. I bought a functioning Fujitsu laptop with a 6th gen Core i5 Processor and 8 GB RAM for $80 on Ebay. Computers with a 7th gen Intel Core Processor or older won’t officially run Windows 11 so they are selling for cheap these days, if you shop around.
Tiny Core can loadit self into RAM, but it doesn’t have to, you can do a normal install as well. Also even if you want to run it from RAM, it only takes 46MB in RAM not ideal but manageable with 512MB. Also you can even downgrade if you are not UI dependent, you can install the core (non-tiny version) and only needs 26MB RAM.