I have an old laptop with Win10 that runs slow, would Linux be better?

By jnelsoninjax
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Grand Master

jnelsoninjax

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This laptop is an i5 2.5 GHZ with 4 GB's of RAM, and even with all the tweaking, Windows still takes upwards of 3-5 mins to fully load everything. I would be interested in playing with Linux to see what kind of a performance boost I can gain from it. What distro would be the best one to try? My BIL love Gento, but I'm not sure if that would be a good one to start with, I have never used Linux before.

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cork1958

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My personal preference on that would be Mint 20.3 with XFCE. You don't say what type of graphics card is uses though. I would suggest the newest Mint, but not knowing what GPU it has, that might be to new. Can always run the live version and test it.

Grand Master

jnelsoninjax

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On 26/08/2022 at 12:26, cork1958 said:

My personal preference on that would be mint 20.3 with XFCE. You don't say what type of graphics card is uses though. I would suggest the newest Mint, but not know what GPU it has, that might be to new. Can always run the live version and test it.

Integrated Intel graphics.

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Mindovermaster Global Moderator

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On 26/08/2022 at 11:32, cork1958 said:

One of the great things about Linux is that just about every distro has a live version you can use for testing them. Mint is supposed to be one of the easiest to learn when coming from Windows.

Totally. Live instances are the best, especially when you need to fix something and can't do it with the installed OS.

 

I would consider you use Mint or PopOS. Both are very similar to Windows if you aren't familiar with it.

 

Edit: If you want to get into Arch, Manjaro is a good start, too. :)

Grand Master

cork1958

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On 26/08/2022 at 13:02, Mindovermaster said:

Totally. Live instances are the best, especially when you need to fix something and can't do it with the installed OS.

 

I would consider you use Mint or PopOS. Both are very similar to Windows if you aren't familiar with it.

 

Edit: If you want to get into Arch, Manjaro is a good start, too. :)

I've looked into Arch, Manjaro several times but haven't ever tried them. Always hear good things about them though. Maybe someday I'll give them a try.

Grand Master

cork1958

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On 26/08/2022 at 13:14, Astra.Xtreme said:

Have you tried a fresh install of Win 10?  

A 3-5 minute boot time isn't normal, so I assume something is having a major performance impact on it.

That is why I asked if it had an HDD or SSD installed. Heck, even wife's computer that still has an HDD in it with Windows 10 doesn't take that long to start.

Grand Master

Mindovermaster Global Moderator

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On 26/08/2022 at 12:30, cork1958 said:

I've looked into Arch, Manjaro several times but haven't ever tried them. Always hear good things about them though. Maybe someday I'll give them a try.

For me, though, Manjaro have some limits that I don't like. As their stable/testing/raw different bridges. Yes, you can change it with a simple edit, but Arch is supposed to be open to all. Not linited by the distro.

 

Why I moved to Endeavour. Very simple install, was done in ~10 minutes. (though I had to take a pee..)

 

Was also thinking of Garuda, but I have heard too many horror stories from friends. So I sort of shyed away from that.

 

As soon as you install yay, an AUR helper, everything just, works. Always be wary of junky software. Just because it says it does XYZ, it's not always that simple. Look at reviews and what people are talking about it.

Grand Master

jnelsoninjax

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On 26/08/2022 at 13:32, cork1958 said:

That is why I asked if it had an HDD or SSD installed. Heck, even wife's computer that still has an HDD in it with Windows 10 doesn't take that long to start.

It's an HDD and I am just estimating the time, I just know that I have accessible desktop in ~30 seconds, but loading the few items at startup takes a fair amount of time, I have things like Dtopbox loading at startup, because I use it a lot,

Grand Master

Astra.Xtreme

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Sounds like the HDD is the major bottleneck.  If you're willing to invest some money into it, a SSD would be a huge speed improvement.

This isn't the best option out there (Samsung is better), but this is pretty darn impressive for around $20:  https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-240GB-Solid-SA400S37-240G/dp/B01N5IB20Q/

 

I'm not a Linux guy so I'm only making an assumption, but I can't imagine changing from Win 10 to a Linux distro is going to have a substantial impact on speed.  The HDD is going to drag no matter what it's running.

Grand Master

cork1958

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On 26/08/2022 at 14:51, Astra.Xtreme said:

Sounds like the HDD is the major bottleneck.  If you're willing to invest some money into it, a SSD would be a huge speed improvement.

This isn't the best option out there (Samsung is better), but this is pretty darn impressive for around $20:  https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-240GB-Solid-SA400S37-240G/dp/B01N5IB20Q/

 

I'm not a Linux guy so I'm only making an assumption, but I can't imagine changing from Win 10 to a Linux distro is going to have a substantial impact on speed.  The HDD is going to drag no matter what it's running.

"I can't imagine changing from Win 10 to a Linux distro is going to have a substantial impact on speed.  The HDD is going to drag no matter what it's running"

 

Exactly right! :)

Grand Master

jnelsoninjax

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On 26/08/2022 at 14:51, Astra.Xtreme said:

Sounds like the HDD is the major bottleneck.  If you're willing to invest some money into it, a SSD would be a huge speed improvement.

This isn't the best option out there (Samsung is better), but this is pretty darn impressive for around $20:  https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-240GB-Solid-SA400S37-240G/dp/B01N5IB20Q/

 

I'm not a Linux guy so I'm only making an assumption, but I can't imagine changing from Win 10 to a Linux distro is going to have a substantial impact on speed.  The HDD is going to drag no matter what it's running.

CrystalDiskInfo_20220826215653.png.5a85ec856aa20567098be95691a92641.png

If I am going to continue to use it for much longer, I think I will invest in an SSD. This is an old laptop that my niece's girlfriend was given to do school work on and then told she could keep it, and it has just been sitting on the shelf collecting dust and cat fur until my desktop died.

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Xenon

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On 26/08/2022 at 12:26, cork1958 said:

My personal preference on that would be Mint 20.3 with XFCE. You don't say what type of graphics card is uses though. I would suggest the newest Mint, but not knowing what GPU it has, that might be to new. Can always run the live version and test it.

Go with Mint. Its easy to use and should run fine on it. 

Grand Master

Nick H. Supervisor

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Upgrade from the HDD to an SSD. I did it last year with my laptop and my mother's older laptop and the difference in boot time was incredible.

 

But to answer your question, I would go for Linux Mint. It's a great OS to learn some of the basics of Linux while at the same time being a system that you can install and run with out of the box.

Grand Master

Matthew S.

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On 26/08/2022 at 21:59, jnelsoninjax said:

CrystalDiskInfo_20220826215653.png.5a85ec856aa20567098be95691a92641.png

If I am going to continue to use it for much longer, I think I will invest in an SSD. This is an old laptop that my niece's girlfriend was given to do school work on and then told she could keep it, and it has just been sitting on the shelf collecting dust and cat fur until my desktop died.

Looks like that harddrive is starting its death roll.

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hellowalkman Reporter

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On 26/08/2022 at 21:53, jnelsoninjax said:

This laptop is an i5 2.5 GHZ with 4 GB's of RAM, and even with all the tweaking, Windows still takes upwards of 3-5 mins to fully load everything. I would be interested in playing with Linux to see what kind of a performance boost I can gain from it. What distro would be the best one to try? My BIL love Gento, but I'm not sure if that would be a good one to start with, I have never used Linux before.

I would definitely consider adding another RAM stick of the same speed (possibly also a cheap SSD like the Crucial BX500 if there's space for an optical drive). After that you can go for a lightweight Linux distro.

Grand Master

jnelsoninjax

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On 27/08/2022 at 14:31, hellowalkman said:

I would definitely consider adding another RAM stick of the same speed (possibly also a cheap SSD like the Crucial BX500 if there's space for an optical drive). After that you can go for a lightweight Linux distro.

The RAM slots are full, I do not know the max the board can handle.

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hellowalkman Reporter

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On 28/08/2022 at 02:04, jnelsoninjax said:

The RAM slots are full, I do not know the max the board can handle.

interesting. In that case, I recommend going for something like the MX500 as it comes with its own DRAM cache.

Grand Master

inactive

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On 26/08/2022 at 12:23, jnelsoninjax said:

This laptop is an i5 2.5 GHZ with 4 GB's of RAM, and even with all the tweaking, Windows still takes upwards of 3-5 mins to fully load everything.

 

Linux Mint v21.0-Xfce (which I prefer over Cinnamon, slow hardware or not) will almost certainly be better than that as that's too long and you got a respectable CPU to.

 

even my old AMD Athlon X2 3600+ CPU (dual core from basically late 2000's) with a 250GB HDD and 4GB of RAM (the RAM cannot be upgraded any further as the ASUS board is at it's limit) boots up and is usable well faster than 3-5 minutes on Mint 21.0-Xfce. I did not time it, but starting from when the OS loads I can't imagine it's more than roughly 2 minutes tops off the top of my head to get the computer in a usable state.

 

but honestly, if you use that fairly often a SSD would be worth getting since the boot up times will drop significantly (and load times of programs will drop significantly, especially when you are trying to load multiple programs at the same time). still, even a regular hard drive should not take 3-5min to finish booting and getting to a usable state.

 

even on a laptop I got with a CLEARLY underpowered CPU (and 8GB of RAM and currently has a 128GB SSD in it)... Linux Mint clearly runs better than Windows 10 does overall. sure, the CPU is still slow either way, but since it does not have many CPU cycles to spare in general, you don't have all of that background junk on Mint that Windows 10 does using up a already low amount of CPU resources which I think is ultimately why Mint runs better than Win10 on that laptop. so Mint runs smoother and becomes usable quicker when booting up. plus, it seems with updates in general they install faster on Mint than Windows which is probably a much bigger deal when you already got a well underpowered CPU.

 

granted, the OP's CPU is still plenty good enough either way with Mint or Win10. but assuming the OP is staying on Win10, a SSD is the bottom line answer to give his overall system a solid performance boost.

 

 

On 26/08/2022 at 14:16, jnelsoninjax said:

It's an HDD and I am just estimating the time, I just know that I have accessible desktop in ~30 seconds, but loading the few items at startup takes a fair amount of time, I have things like Dtopbox loading at startup, because I use it a lot,

 

That's typical behavior on a regular HDD. because if you are only loading one thing at a time, it's not too bad, but if you try to load more than one thing at a time, and each of those things require decent hard drive activity, the system will slow to a crawl temporarily.

 

even on Mint on my old 250GB HDD etc. after boot up if I load the browser, it take a bit for the browser to initially load which is not bad and expected. but say after a fresh boot up I ran system updates to Mint and there is decent hard drive activity of installing those updates and then I try loading the browser from scratch, while the updates are using the hard drive decently, it will slow to a crawl temporarily.

 

but the obvious fix in these cases, which I am sure everyone already mentioned, is to get a SSD as that will make a significant difference in these cases.

Edited by ThaCrip

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