I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.
You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.
Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.
without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point
I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter’s first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it’s pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling…
