What should I do with this netbook?

By Sszecret
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Grand Master

Sszecret Veteran

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I have this Acer Aspire One ( http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-One-D255E-13281/dp/B004UA9P8O )  just sitting around the house and I was wondering what I could do to make proper use of it. 

It has a dual core Atom N450 clocked at 1.66 GHz, one gig of RAM and a 250 GB HDD. It came with Win7 Starter which ran so and so on it. I put Ubuntu on the thing hoping it would somehow run a bit smoother, but to my disappointment there's been no improvement. Heck, it even stutters at times when playing a YT video. 

Do you guys have any suggestions for what I could do with this netbook? 

 

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philcruicks

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It'll be the RAM causing the issue, I has a little Samsung netbook back in the day, an upgrade to 2GB helped immensely, then it should be OK to be a little media device attached to your TV.

Other than that...not much.

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winrez

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My kid has one and uses it with a external USB drive as network backup/personal server (we upgraded the ram) but still can't handle anything more basic than that anymore even with a clean OS install websites crawl still.

Grand Master

Mindovermaster Global Moderator

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Put Windows 10 on it.

You might also want to upgrade it to 2 GB RAM.

If Windows 7 didn't work on it well, what makes you think Windows 10 will make it any better?

 

OP, Did you try a lighter version of Ubuntu, as Xubuntu or Lubuntu? Unity is a bit heavy on RAM.

Grand Master

Mockingbird

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If Windows 7 didn't work on it well, what makes you think Windows 10 will make it any better?

 

OP, Did you try a lighter version of Ubuntu, as Xubuntu or Lubuntu? Unity is a bit heavy on RAM.

...because Windows 10 is a more efficient operating system and the memory compression method in the latest Insider build should help with low RAM.

Grand Master

Sszecret Veteran

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Been away from Neowin for a couple of days, so sorry for the delay in the response. :) 

Sounds like a candidate for Linux Mint.

I'll try it out and see how it goes. 

 

If Windows 7 didn't work on it well, what makes you think Windows 10 will make it any better?

 

OP, Did you try a lighter version of Ubuntu, as Xubuntu or Lubuntu? Unity is a bit heavy on RAM.

Nope, I haven't looked at other distros, but I'll try out some of the suggestions in this thread. 

My kid has one and uses it with a external USB drive as network backup/personal server (we upgraded the ram) but still can't handle anything more basic than that anymore even with a clean OS install websites crawl still.

It's a bit of a throwaway kind of a device (I know, that sounds terrible), but I'll consider maybe upgrading the RAM. 

It'll be the RAM causing the issue, I has a little Samsung netbook back in the day, an upgrade to 2GB helped immensely, then it should be OK to be a little media device attached to your TV.

Other than that...not much.

As I said above, will consider upgrading the RAM, but wanted to know what I could do with it as is. Thanks for the input though. :) 

Grand Master

LUTZIFER

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I'd put Windows 10 on it. Should work great.

I had one of them netbooks many years ago, before Windows 7 was out, so it had XP on it, cuz of course nothing at that time could run Vista properly,

anyways, after a bit I installed a preview release of Windows 7, then full when final, and those were Pro versions, not Starter, with everything enabled, and the Windows 7 ran awesome on it, way better than XP did by a long shot.

I'd imagine Windows 10 should work nicely.

Grand Master

Sszecret Veteran

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I'd put Windows 10 on it. Should work great.

I had one of them netbooks many years ago, before Windows 7 was out, so it had XP on it, cuz of course nothing at that time could run Vista properly,

anyways, after a bit I installed a preview release of Windows 7, then full when final, and those were Pro versions, not Starter, with everything enabled, and the Windows 7 ran awesome on it, way better than XP did by a long shot.

I'd imagine Windows 10 should work nicely.

Well, I shall blow it away and install 7 Starter then do the upgrade to 10. After about a week or two to see how it performs I'll decide if it stays on 10 or I switch it to one of the Linux distros. Either way, it's fine with me. Thanks for the reply. :)

  • 4 weeks later...
Grand Master

Sszecret Veteran

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Ok, so after some weeks of testing, I've tried W10, Linux Mint and elementary OS and it looks like elementary is the one I get along with the best. The reason I tried Ubuntu is because it was the distro I was most familiar with, but I'm willing to maybe try out some new ones in the future. Until then, I'll keep elementary on it. Thanks a bunch to V9s for the suggestion.

Question though: Is there any way to mark the topic as solved or whatever? I can't seem to find it in the newer version of the forum. :) 

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