Reviving old laptop

DigitalRelish

DigitalRelish

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Will
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I've got an old laptop which originally ran Windows XP (rather slowly). It's got a 1.8GHz Celeron processor, 256MB RAM and a 30GB hard drive.

Tonight, I installed Edubuntu onto it, thinking my 4-year old might be able to get some use out of it, but it's underpowered for it so I'm looking for a more lightweight alternative. Anybody any suggestions or experience of a similar situation?
 
If the laptop is only going to be used for browsing the next I think it would be better to get a cheap tablet or a used ipad2/3.
 
Try Puppy Linux. (there might be a newer equivalent) It doesn't need much in the way of resources and works well on my old computer. You can always make a live disk or USB stick to try it out without installing it.
 
The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 2100. It does appear I have upgraded the RAM to a massive 512MB at some point!

Didn't really have any plans to do anything specific with it, but it was just sitting around doing nothing anyway. It would be nice to be able to let my daughter use it for basic stuff e.g. typing. She already has an iPad Mini and I'm not looking to spend any money on the laptop or its replacement.

I do have the option of reinstalling XP via the recovery CD. Just wondered if I could get better performance from a flavour of Linux.
 
Try Xubuntu or Lubuntu. In fact, give them all a try right from a USB stick. And if one seems to suit the PC, install it. It's easy enough to replace it if you change your mind.

We have a couple on Xubuntu at home. Which the family get on well with. My daughter liked the GCompris educational package from the software store.
 
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Thanks for all the suggestions so far. Plenty to keep me busy!
 
Another vote for puppy Linux or crunchbang. Very lightweight Linux distributions
 
Will, not one of the more common distributions but try Elementary OS. It's a lightweight Distro based on Ubuntu but it's made to look like Mac OS which your daughter might already be familiar with (if she's been using Daddy's PCs').
 
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