Hey to all, glad to join your community!

I have an old desktop PC (Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, ASUS P4VM800 motherboard, 2GB DDR400, Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro AGP, 1xIDE & 1xSATA hard disk) with Windows 7 already installed. I want to give it away to a friend which is a simple Windows user. of course the machine with windows xp or windows 7 is crawling like a snail and as a linux user myself i want to install a distro to refresh this piece of junk and make him a windows-free man. My main problem, as you can imagine, is the graphics card. AMD of course stopped supporting the card ages ago, so no official drivers that support the latest X.org exist. I tried a couple of distro's already (Xubuntu 10.04, Xubuntu 11.10, Linux Mint 12 with GNOME3,xfce,LXDE) but i keep getting the same problem, the system is lagging like crazy. And i can't seem able to make it work. i tried loads of suggestions i found online but nothing does the trick. Of course, i can go out and buy an AGP nvidia card, because its absolutely pointless. I wanna make this system work. So any suggestion, from anyone, would be much appreciated. And i mean ANY suggestion (use another distro, use another set of open-source drivers, anything..) Let me give you a list some of the things i tried to save you some trouble.

http://www.linuxinsight.com/your-ati...erver-1.3.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1565636
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopi...=57678&start=0

Please keep in mind that the guy is a noobie - simple windows user.

Thnx in advance.

I have had the best luck with Slackware and Debian. Other ones I've tried with less luck, generally speaking, are Linux Mint and Ubuntu.

i'll try either and post back

Windows for the "simple Windows user." It's obnoxious to force someone to switch to Linux (and I say that as a Linux enthusiast), and if the computer is a "piece of junk," Linux will not change that fact.

If Windows XP is slow on a machine like that then there is something wrong with the machine, not the OS. Are you certain that all parts in that machine are OK?
By the way, the free radeon drivers are official drivers, since AMD is supporting the project with paid developers.
So, at first I would make certain that the machine is OK, before trying to fix the software side.
But it seems to me that your task is somewhat pointless. You can't make a someone Windows free with just giving him a Linux machine, especially if the person is, as you stated, a "simple Windows user".

first of all, i'm not forcing anyone. second, i wrote this thread to get any suggestions about what distro should i use, or software/drivers to keep this machine alive a few years more. i'm not expecting/want to have top notch speeds, watch HD movies or running 19453 processes together. i certainly did not created the thread to discuss any ethical or issues about windows/linux subjects. probably there's another place for that : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...nux-general-1/

so please, if you want to post something that's relevant to my problem, i'm all ears, otherwise stop flaming the thread with irrelevant posts.

@TobiSGD the machine is junk yes, but all hardware pieces are working fine, as far as i know. maybe the drivers are official but i didn't see any downloads in the AMD site.

I re-read this post a few times. I think from their point of view, their answers are correct. Let me explain.

The so called pos computer should not be slow on windows 7 or xp. In fact it should be quite usable (not fast, usable). The second proof is your attempts to try linux where by they also exhibit unusual symptoms.

I think you should diag this computer. Memory is off or wrong or not showing full amount. Drives set wrong or bad cables or failing controllers or such.

Some people just can't handle linux. If you friend can then you ought to at least provide a good system and a good OS.

Almost every video card made in the last 15 years supports vesa, it is good for common tasks.

I've had similar issues with graphics problems on a couple old computer, and on my P4 that I currently use. After I popped my hard drive into it last year, the graphics in my Ubuntu 11.04 install were pretty indescribable and made the desktop unusable. Had similar graphics problem a few days ago when I tried installing Linux Mint 11, and then 12 after I downloaded a fresh ISO. The desktop graphics on Mandriva 10.2 work fine (Hardly ever boot to it though). Slackware 13.37 works fine. Debian Squeeze works fine. Have a 12-yr-old laptop that would give me a blank screen after gnome started up, and completely froze the system. Couldn't get Debian or Ubuntu on that last year, so I went with Slackware and running pretty smooth today.

For ease of use bbb13, I'd suggest if you're going to try Debian or Slackware, try Debian first.

I've seen XP slow down a lot of older computers (from around 2000), but usually once I upgrade the memory from 512K, there's a significant improvement. My sister has a p4 with 1.7Ghz cpu and 1G of RAM(max her computer can take), but XP still runs terribly slow at times (doing updates and things most likely). I can hear that hard drive grinding away. An SATA drive and controller would help with that. I don't know how much diagnosis you've done, but you might try some benchmarking utilities to test the hard drive speed. Sounds like the hard drive isn't the only issue of course, but might give you some ideas.

Having a copy of Trinity Rescue Kit might also be helpful while you're working on this computer.
Not that you want to repair or recover things in this case, but it's got access to utils like hdparm

I'm no Linux expert, and not a good writer because I sometimes forget to be literal, but just wanted to throw in my two cents. My hardware is definitely not the best around; the p4 I said I'm using I got on ebay for $50. Compact model, a Dell Optiplex, that has only two pci slots and one bay that I'm using for a dvd rw drive. But it works for me, for what I need it to do. Graphics a little choppy at times when watching movies on Amazon, but usually don't notice. I have 128 Megs of VideoRam, so I tend to think it's a driver issue. 4 colors is the max available on SVGA monitors these days, right? Just kidding, I'm sure I'm getting at least 256 with 16 million shades of gray.

You might want to make a backup of that Windows drive before you blow it away though.

Just for reference I have 2 old Dell GX270 3.2GHz P4's ($75 each from the local surplus store). I have upgraded the memory to 4Gb & used Geforce 7600 or 6200 AGP cards. Win XP, Win 7, Ubuntu & Debian (XFCE desktop) runs reasonably well. While I still had the service, I streamed Netflix. The only issue I have had is that Windows 7 did a fairly regular blue screen on me. These machines are still useful as web browsers, servers / multimedia machines (XBMC @ 1920x1080). Current games does not work, multitasking is not a good idea and flash video stutters somewhat.

In other words, I do not think the P4 is the problem - if you can get some cheap upgrades on ebay, a better video card with some more memory might help + maybe a SSD. Just be careful not to spend more on upgrades than what a cheap low end desktop would cost you.

Regards,
Stefan

Just for the hell of it, i did a memtest yesterday and everything checked out. And i found an nvidia 5600xt in my storage,that means better linux compatibility. I'm using the sata II hard disk for the linux installations.i can't find what exactly the problem is. I dont believe that "bad cables" causing such a problem. I used pclinuxos from a live cd and i have to say it was way more faster than anything else.and,the windows 7 installation is almost barebones,i can't justify the 40sec start up of firefox, neither the 1min boot time!

Still suggests some major issue going on. A live cd should be way faster than that even.

Do a hard drive diag maybe. Get ultimate boot cd for some tests.

Was the correct amount of memory reported? At correct speeds? '


Any chance the bios settings have gone way off? Cpu multiplier or other? Try fail safe or default settings. Can't get worse.

I have a Dell P4 3.4 GB MHz 4 GB RAM with Debian Squeeze on it and it works like a champ. I really don't see any noticeable lag compared with my newer systems.

I agree that something else is going on unrelated to the CPU.

i'm doing various tests and checking things, i'll report back.

Curious to know what you find.

I have an old 2000/ 2001 DELL P4 1 gig ram and a nvidia gforce2 mx 400
that is running just fine on ScientificLinux 6.1 32bit
using the neuveau driver ( the nvidia 96 driver and xorg are not supported and longer)