Efficient Windows for older hardware

Solitaire

Given this is a very general thing and related to hardware I think its better off here than in Windows...

Simply put: there's a lot of old single- and slow dual-core PCs out there that are winding up in the hands of The Relatives, our computer-illiterate family and friends who want to learn how to use PCs and Teh Interwebs. All they want to do is browse the Web, watch vids, listen to music and potter around with OpenOffice; the problem is that regardless of what OS is running on them antivirus and in particular browser requirements have ballooned of late, with mainstream browsers in particular hogging tons of CPU and entire gigabytes of RAM, in order to perform Super Complicated Tasks such as, um, display YouTube

The catch is that many of these machines only have a single CPU core and 1GB of RAM, and I'm wondering if there should be a resource here giving people mid-level advice on how to optimise various OSes (particularly XP and Vista, as most of the machines will be running these and many of the target end-users probably won't take to Ubuntu very well) and pick/prune browsers and other software so that when they hand these old, cheap machines over to their less technical relatives the machines won't be running at a crawl

fionny

They must be very old computers indeed if they wont run xp and a browser! If they are that old just put Linux on them, they will get a more reasonable lease of life that way. There is a program called XPlite which removes unneccessary features but its not free... also there is freeware called nlite see article here:

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:nlitexp


You could always turn off all visual effects in xp and go into msconfig to stop all unneccessary programs launching at start and do the same with services.msc

Forget about using Vista, that was always more resource heavy then any other OS

Solitaire

Um, no, we're talking P4-era machines here I'm talking "slow" rather than "can't run anything" and nowadays its the browser and its addons (flash etc.) that's the main culprits. Also, bear in mind that XP has octupled in requirements since release (back in the day you could run it on an old laptop with a whopping 96MB of RAM ). Fast, simple-to-use, minimalist-requirement browsers (as opposed to Firefox 3.6 and up using nearly a gig of RAM all on its own!) and OS tweaks are the things I was thinking of.

Razzuh

I'd say go with XP. It's really the only option I can think of if you'd like to avoid linux. It's still supported by Microsoft for a while longer and anything older than that would just cause you hassle.

The 1 GB ram is a problem with modern browsers. I wouldn't bother trying to strip down XP though, you won't get much out of it. The best thing to do would be just tell your relatives they need to cough up the 20 quid for another GB of RAM and then that'll do them find for a couple of years. Windows and anti-virus will take up about 900MB and that'll leave a whole GB for firefox/opera/whatever to use up. That's better than giving them old browser versions that they'll have issues with when it comes to plugins etc. or that might have security vulnerabilities. The extra gig is worth it.