I was looking for a cheap secondary laptop but most stuff here (being Australia) is fairly pricey. I have an old laptop from about 8 years ago that's only really good as a media device or for typing junk on the go. I was wondering what would be the best version of Linux to load up. Is chrome OS worth my time at all?
Specs! (Just for a laugh, No seriously. My phone has better specs than this old thing.)
Compaq CQ60
Dual core 1.66 GHz Intel CPU
2GB of ram
A whole 139 GB hard drive, 56GB of that is free. (Not including windows recovery partition)
It's currently running windows Vista.
Really keen to know folks thoughts on the topic.
Well first I would get a new hard drive. 320GB in your price range? Then I'd max the ram out if its a core or core 2, though you might be ok where you are.
Look up the drivers and see if theres stuff past windows 7. Your first problem will be driver support as most pentium laptops from 8 years ago, guessing thats what you have, have had their support dropped and not for any bullshit reason either. In my repairing them they're just a pain in the ass. So hard drive, ram, drivers.
Then, your OS set up. If you can do 7, get that in there and get Never10. I've heard its great for keeping windows 10 out. After you install windows choose a linux. Since you have a dual core machine it won't be as bad as you think and if you can only have 2 or 3 gigs of ram then get 4 or 5 gigs of swap and that'll be fine.
Good luck
That spec is the same as an old laptop I use for testing Linux distros
Need more space on hard drive or will get very squeezed. a bigger hard drive would be essential if you really have to dual boot, but swapping drive for a similar size one for just Linux would be an option
Only Install a lightweight distro - Lubuntu with LXDE is very lightweight. Xubuntu with XFCE has a better look.
You will be surprised how fast this machine can perform compared to Vista