How to "simplify" a laptop

kstruckcountry · January 18, 2013

My grandpa had an Averatec laptop kicking around, and gave it to me since it's a little outdated. Most of you probably have never heard of the brand, but it's a very small laptop, 12-13".

I've used it some, and while XP is alright, all I really need it for is getting on the internet. Basically all I want it to do is pull up webpages and watch youtube. So, I'd like any suggestions the computer gurus have on what I can do to make it a little better internet machine. My first thought was to switch to Linux, would that be a worthwhile change? The only programs it need to run are Chrome and a flash player.

Any ideas for this little project are much appreciated.

Chris · January 18, 2013

Add some ram to it, and change it over to Linux Mint. I used to dual boot Mint with Win 7 on my laptop before I made the switch to Win 8.

I'm in school for this kind of stuff.

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music · January 18, 2013

XP is a great OS, but it's pretty big. If you're comfortable w/ command line stuff, I'd start w/ a small Linux distro, and use Chrome. Installing Linux can be easy or hard, and the bigger the distro, the easier it seems to be. I haven't used Linux in a while, but when I did... I used Slack and Ubuntu. Slackware is (was?) a small distro. I seem to remember a "Chrome linux" recently, so you may want to search on that. The idea is a "minimum linux for web use", iirc. I'd also check into the "ultra small" linux distros, like "damn small linux", plus Chrome.

Just some quick thoughts... on a truck forum

kstruckcountry · January 18, 2013

Linux sounds like the way to go, I think Mint would work well, I'll check into the chrome Linux too.

Chris · January 18, 2013

I loved Linux Mint

jlr860 · January 20, 2013

Just test Mint out with the live CD/USB first that way you know all the important stuff like wireless will work without hassle. Seems like they don't really have problems with that latelly but if they do it may be more than you want to get into to make it work.

jdnoble18 · January 30, 2013

Have you tried a stripped down version of XP? Those performance edition versions of XP are pretty snappy with older hardware.

jlr860 · January 31, 2013

This reminds me, switching to the classic xp theme will run faster. Along with going to control panel > system > performance and changing the animations to off can't remember exactly may want to leave some on. Use microsoft security essentials for antivirus (free, simple, low requirements). Finally defragment the disk and run ccleaner.