This is a follow-up to a year old post titled Another Option for the Old Machine.
A year ago I determined that Windows 2000 standard was the most reasonable OS for my old Thinkpad 600e laptop. It is just the most “usable” as far as performance goes.
However, during the past year I’ve installed and removed enough stuff on this thing that has started to get annoyingly sluggish. Reload time! I decided that before I reloaded Win2K I’d try out some more Linux options first to see if anything new has popped up.
Fluxbuntu is the first one I tried. It is an Ubuntu (7.10?) derivative running the Fluxbox window manager. It runs tolerably well, but would probably be better suited to a Pentium III based machine. I liked it, but ultimately decided to look at other options to see if I could find something that liked a P II based machine a bit more.
The bundled Kazehakase web browser works quite well (in spite of the fact that I’d never heard of it). All my usual Web 2.0 sites seemed to work well and the browser performance was decent in most cases.
Next up was Puppy Linux 4.0.0. It runs incredibly well on this old laptop! To be honest, I’m amazed at how fast things happen. Feels like 1997 again and the laptop is reborn.
For web browsing, puppy relies on SeaMonkey which does a fine job. I learned, quickly, that installing Firefox 3 was not the best way to treat this old machine. Even though the OS was fast, that browser (also in Windows 2000) just clobbers this laptop. While I’ve not traditionally been a huge fan of SeaMonkey, it seems to be just the ticket in this case.
I might try to install Kazehakase though. Just for grins. If I get bored and want to work out the dependencies…
Based on the site, it looks like Puppy will do fine on Pentiums with 32MB and up. Highly recommended.
I next wanted to try DeLi Linux. Looking at the site and some reviews, it might be just the ticket. However, after the installation I couldn’t get it to boot. Some sort of lilo issue… Unfortunately, I ran out of time – I need this laptop back up and operational! – and tabled that for another day.
I’d like to find a live CD option for DeLi to try it out. The image I grabbed appears to only be for installs though.
What Now?
So here’s where I’m at: I’m currently (even as I write this) installing a clean Windows 2000 onto the laptop. I’m then going to run Puppy on it, via boot CD and take the options to store the kernel and my files and stuff on to the local hard disk.
In other words, I’ll be easily dual-booting between Win2k and Puppy.
Based on my testing, I’ve realized that most of my perceived sluggishness on Windows 2000 was coming from trying to use Firefox 3. I need to ponder what browser to use this time around…
Possibly Related posts:
[...] old IBM Thinkpad 600e. Just back in September I thought I had hit upon the perfect solution: Dual-booting Windows 2000 and Puppy Linux. However, after just a few weeks I stopped using Puppy due to some browser issues and was back to [...]