My main laptop is pretty poor. It's not overly old (2007) but it's basic hardware specifications are as follows: Celeron M 530 at 1.73Ghz 2GB RAM Sis Mirage 3 graphics. Internal 20 GB hard drive (But that's not an issue, it's OS only, all data is on a 1TB external USB hard drive) It's original hard drive failed so I pulled a 20 GB from an old laptop with a fried motherboard. It's got a 'designed for Windows Vista Basic' sticker, but I am currently running Windows XP. I'd prefer either Windows 7 (Hard drive space issue, so that's out) or Linux... However, it's graphics chipset seems to have support so poor that I can only run in VGA/VESA resolutions with no hardware acceleration. I guess I'm just asking for suggestions to make it more usable, really. I have a more powerful desktop, but I like to use this laptop for web browsing and some programming on the move, so anything to make it better to work with would be amazing.
Windows or Linux. I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else unless it's for specialized reasons. Seconding TmEE, Win XP is probably your best choice. I have a netbook (1 gb ram, single core 1.something ghz, 140 gb hard drive) that still runs on XP and it does well.
Get a 64gb SSD and throw windows 7 on there. It'll be a snappy little fucker and you'll completely forget that it has such a poor CPU in it.
I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. An ssd would be put to waste with normal operations if it had a slow cpu along with it. I have tried just that same scenario before and can assure you, you won't notice the difference the ssd makes except maybe in power consumption and noise (which is why I still left the ssd in). Just like everyone else said on here, stick with Win XP and tweak the hell outta it.
Yes, SSD on a slow machine does not make as big difference as it does on already fast machine. My GF has a similarly specced machine and there's very little difference in operation between SSD and normal HDD.
It really depends on the usage. If all you are going to do is spend your time in one program/browser/game you are less likely to notice the difference. Even a Pentium 4 can be bottlenecked by the fastest 15,000rpm HDD
So the general opinion is to stick with XP? I thought as much. A solid state is out of the questions, simply because of price, if I had the money to upgrade, I'd not waste it on a laptop with such a poor GPU. Any specific optimisation tips aside from disabling services I never use?
Linux DOES support the SiS Mirage 3 - you need to install/setup the SiS M671 driver. There's LOTS of info on that with a simple google search on something like "ubuntu sis m671 driver". Here's a good site for using that chipset with an Ubuntu derivative: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/sis
