[Sussex] PIII 700 MHz 128MB RAM 20GB HDD [Was New members at moots]

[Fay Zee]

On 31/03/07, Steve 'Dobbo' Dobson <steve at dobson.org> wrote:
> The single best thing you can do to speed up any computer is throw
> memory at it.  The Linux kernel is designed to buffer as much of
> the disk at it can in the memory that isn't being used being used by
> the applications and other programs you're running.

On 31/03/07, linux at oneandoneis2.org <linux at oneandoneis2.org> wrote:
> Based on my current laptop, which is a bit slow & old and is running
> Xubuntu, I'd say DSL - you could load the whole thing into RAM and get
> very fast performance compared to Xubuntu, which while being a
> lightweight is nowhere near as "featherweight" as DSL..
> Dominic

On 31/03/07, David Morris <slug at greenacre.no-ip.com> wrote:
> I have a PII 700Mhz with 512 ram laptop and it runs Ubuntu edgy no
> problems,

On 31/03/07, Colin Tuckley <colin at tuckley.org> wrote:
> I'd say DSL with that small an amount of RAM.
> However, you should have a look on Ebay and see if you can find it some more
> RAM, for 10 quid you can probably upgrade to 256Mb RAM and at that point you
> could run pretty much any Linux Distro.
>
> You didn't say what the screen resolution was, but that's probably a more
> limiting factor in running a GUI than the RAM or processor speed.

So basically the user experience all boils down to memory, not
processor size ...

My newly acquired PIII 700Mhz laptop is a Dell Latitude L400 model.

I chose this laptop for its light weight and small, slim size.

It has a 12.1-inch diagonal active-matrix display, with XGA
(1024-by-768) resolution.
It's ultraportable - lightweight so no internal FDD or CD-ROM. However
it has USB for use with pen drive media. I picked up a Dell Latitude
external FDD for it and I'm expecting an external CD-ROM for it soon.
I don't know about the current availability of an external DVD, but
the L400 shares media bay modules with the C series and can apparently
take FDD, CDROM, CDRW, DVD, CDRW/DVD Combo and DVDRW drives.

The L400 uses PC-100 type memory and has 1 bank - a total of 1 memory
socket. It was originally released with 64MB of RAM and supports up to
256MB of RAM, though mine has 128MB. It takes the PC100 SDRAM SODIMMs.
If I want to upgrade from 128MB to 256MB I'll apparently be looking
for a chip of 32x64-100MHz PC100, 144p SODIMM, 3.3v, Sync. Someone at
a computer parts place told me this isn't very widely available. I saw
one on eBay for £40.

Fay