I acquired an old computer. It's an Intel celeron (on board video) with Windows Vista on it. It ran really good.

I installed Linux Mint Xfce. This thing is so slow it hardly works

Can't watch video on youtube. Shows a frame, you can hear the sound (sometimes), but doesn't play the video. If it does, it will skip to each frame about 5 to 10 seconds. I thought it was re-buffering, but it's the video that can't play. I turned off all the stuff you can in video, still does it.

Everything is delayed. If you click on the mint menu, it takes 3 seconds to pop up. 45Mbps Internet takes 45 seconds to open up cragslist.

Today, it seems to be running a bit faster, but EVERYTHING you do, takes so long. Lags way behind.

I know a 7 year old computer back in the Vista days is slow, but it should run Mint Xfce?

If you had a windows computer with a virus, this is how the Linux system is running (not a virus because this is a clean install).

Tried a few other Linux OS's, but got the same thing with the video.

What could be wrong?

Thank you,
Chris.

It might be useful to know the specs and hardware of this box before making a diagnosis.

when?

also, i bet you would have more difficulties trying to install windows 10 on that.

you need something designed for old computers. (AntiX)

also, i susupect some graphic driver issue, so output of please.

What did you install linux to? Some PNY stick that has write speeds slower than dialup? Sounds a bit like my experience using such a stick. It's such a cute stick though. But soo slow that I had to watch youtube with youtube-dl and playing the file after it was written to the stick (make a sandwich, watch some non-internet tv, blah blah blah). The read speed was "much" better than the writes. Less of an issue these days since sticks are typically pretty fast now, at least the ones that advertize that feature, plus cost more. And at the time I was on a relatively beefy machine, so I made a ramdisk and put .mozilla's cache on it to cope with that slow storage device.

Otherwise how much RAM? I had to stop using a P4 laptop with a 2.8GHz single core processor because 512MB of RAM just isn't enough for ad driven media services on modern browsers. If you're not sporting at least 2GB RAM, you might have to go even leaner than xfce. Run nmon, and if you're in a "wait" state on cpu usage, that's probably the disk (cache or swapping). Run top and see what's slowing you down, if it's pulseaudio at 100% CPU, there's your problem. Otherwise I would guess that you're using the vesa or framebuffer video driver. But that slow youtube thing reminds me of my experience with a slow PNY stick on an almost nice 3GHz+ dual CPU machine with many G's of RAM (still of the 32 bit variety though).

You really need to provide some sort of specs for this. Most likely, the video driver needs to installed from non-free, or something. But you need to provide some specifics.
This is somewhat contradictory. A 7 year old computer should have Windows 7 installed. Windows Vista might have been installed on a ten year old computer.

If it has, say, 2GB of RAM, sure. If you have less than that, I'd recommend Debian with XFCE4 instead. I have Debian 9 with XFCE4 running on computers with 512MB of RAM. I wouldn't recommend Debian on a computer with less than 256MB of RAM, though.

Depending on the precise specs of your computer, a modern distribution running XFCE4 should be fine. A 10 year old Windows Vista era computer should generally be fine. Since you say "Celeron" rather than "Celeron D", I'm guessing that this computer is Core based...should be perfectly fine for the current Debian Stable. The amount of RAM is really the big question.

Still, the type of CPU could easily be determined with "cat /proc/cpuinfo". The output of "lspci" should determine the video chip...

I'd give Puppy a try.

Runs in RAM (the fastest component of any machine), and works like a dream with old hardware. I run a 15-yr old Dell Inspiron lappie with a 2.6 GHz P4 and 1.5 GB of RAM, triple-booting 3 flavours of Puppy Linux. I know it sounds like I'm fantasizing, but I tell you this; it will give a much newer machine running Win 7 on a quad-core a run for its money.

Master Kuo will poo-poo anything I say about Puppy, though, so I'm probably wasting my time.

But I'll echo others on this thread; some specs will definitely help here.


Mike.

1 members found this post helpful.

Sorry for the delay, I was gone, back now.

2GB of Ram.

Here is my hardware.

I installed to a DVD.

Thank you for all the replies,
Chris.

Thanks,
Chris.

I'm in shock that old processor is running x64. Try 32 bit, also don't expect much from a single core these days. That is likely to be a huge problem as well. Play a youtube video with top running in a terminal. Check out your cpu usage %.

Sorry, this might be the old one. Since I did this, I installed the 32bit. I'll do it again and post back.

Chris.

Originally, I used the same disc I used for my main computer. When I realized it, I installed the 32bit. When asked, I gave the output for when I first used the 64bit, before I realized it. Here is the one I've been using.

Anything here you see why the computer basically doesn't work? Shouldn't this be able to run Mint Xfce?

I used Puppy before (on a different computer). I tried it when it first came out also.

Thank you,
Chris.

I don't see any red flags. The big thing I was looking for was whether or not the video had Direct Rendering (Yes). That's good. Although of course moot since apparently this is not output from the current setup.

As for the CPU speed - it should be fine. Right in front of me is a computer playing YouTube smoothly on Chromium, and it has a much slower CPU (AMD Sempron 3100+ 1.8Ghz). It has a Passmark of only 452, which is much lower than the 623 Passmark of your Celeron 450. I'm using Chromium, though, which I have found to be much less sluggish than Firefox-ESR.

This machine also has 2GB of RAM, and is also running XFCE4. It's using a Debian 9 install, though, which may be significantly more efficient than Linux Mint.

too easy:

linux distros 4 old hardware ( google )

I did, I got Mint Xfce. One problem is, we kind of established that it should work. My hardware is good enough for it to work.

Mint Xfce is way less on resources then Windows Vista. Vista ran good on this computer.

Chris.

I tried the live, lahr-6.0.5_PAE (Puppy), man that was cool. Browser was to old to work on a lot of video. Not sure why the latest OS comes with an outdated browser.

Hopefully I can get my present system to work. If not, I'll try installing lahr-6.0.5.

With this problem, I've installed OS's that worked out of the box, but then the next day had problems. Maybe updates cause it?

Thank you,
Chris.

If you care about video working in the browser, I would install a 64 bit release (amd64) rather than 32 bit. The big thing is that Chrome is a lot more efficient than Firefox, and the version of Chrome with DRM are strictly from after Google dropped 32 bit Chrome releases.

This matters for Netflix. Fundamentally, Netflix will only work with browsers with DRM, and that means either a recent version of Firefox or a recent version of Chrome. If you install 64 bit, you can use either (and you'll use Chrome, because Firefox sucks). If you install 32 bit, you'll be stuck with just Firefox.

And believe me, with a somewhat slower CPU than yours, Firefox is choppy while Chrome is smooth (AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+, Passmark of 490 vs 623).

The versions of Firefox-ESR and Google-Chrome available for Debian 9 work well with video on modern web sites. Firefox-ESR is installed out-of-box and Google-Chrome is a simple .deb to download and install manually (it will also integrate with the apt software updating system so you will receive software updates--including security updates--along with all of the other updates you update with "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade").

Your hardware should work well with Debian 9 out-of-box, and the web browsers available with Debian 9 work well with video on modern web sites. My main home theater PC is significantly less powerful than yours, and it does just fine (Debian 9, XFCE4, google-chrome).