Dell Inspiron 4000 - Looking for OS suggestions

[DaveLembke]

I just recently built one good laptop out of two and I am looking for OS suggestions for it both Windows as well as Linux GUI type. I have 2 hard drives for it and so I was thinking one with Windows and one with a flavor of Linux.

I installed XP SP2 to it and it was a speedy 600mhz until after all the updates that made it crawl. After all the updates, it went from a surprisingly fast laptop to a crawl and wait 30 seconds after clicking situation.

Dell Inspiron 4000
Pentium III 600
192MB Ram
12GB HD
ATI 2X AGP 128MB Video ( GPU Ram isolated from main Ram so it always has 128 )
CD-RW/DVD drive


I also have a linksys pcmcia wireless nic that i would be using for wifi. I had this working perfect under Windows xp sp2, but it might be an issue with the flavor of linux trying to get wifi drivers. Its a Wireless G 2.4 ghz model wpc54g ver 2

Thanks for suggestions, I know the 192MB Ram is a little on the lite side, but it should be plenty hopefully.

ebay has some cheap pc-100 pc-133 sodimm's

[Broni]

With that type of CPU and 192MB of RAM, the best you can do would be Win 2K.

[BC_Programmer]

Only two distros I think would run adequately would be *censored* Small Linux or Puppy Linux. You could probably get slackware working but configuring a desktop environment that runs adequately would be rather difficult.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for the suggestions. Based on the suggestions, i am going to do 3 things. Since I have 2 hard drives for this laptop that can be swapped out quickly, I am going to go with a Windows 2000 SP4 and a flavor of Linux Dual Boot with grub on one drive, and then the other drive, since XP Pro SP2 runs quick after clean install with about 94MB free of 192MB Ram, but if updated with the 80+ patches and SP3 it starves at 12MB Free, and 3rd, I am going to spend the $20 on ebay to buy another 128mb or 256mb pc-100 or pc-133 sodimm memory stick to bring the RAM up to 256 or 384MB so that it doesnt starve when multitasking as well as maybe a newer Linux distro like Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, 9.x, or 10.04 would run as soon as 256MB ( minimum Ram ) is met. I placed the Ubuntu 10.04 CD in the system and booted and it complained mainly of lack of memory, but eventually got to a desktop 10 minutes later after the constant read of the live distro like features of its try before you install nature.

[Computer_Commando]

That sounds like a good plan.  I did something similar with my old laptop (PII-333, w/544MB RAM).  Ubuntu wasn't that much faster than Windows, but worked well.  WinXP is pretty slow and almost unusable.  One thing I found that will really slow it down is a not up to date version of Adobe Flash, my PIII-933 desktop got slower than the laptop, until it got updated.

[BC_Programmer]

I created 2 and a half hours of my 4 hour long, three part cartoon in a K6-2 350Mhz with 512MB of RAM running windows XP, using Flash MX. the XP install itself was completely stripped- I didn't need internet access which was almost surely why it didn't seem that bad at all.

It's amazing what we'll "put up with" though, when it comes to computer responsiveness- when we have to.