Hi, Linux Gurus,
I have an ongoing project involving collecting unused laptops, refurbishing them and giving them away to underprivileged students. it's always an adventure to see which distro will work best on which machine, although I do have my favorites.
So now I've been working on this Dell Inspiron 1150. It's got a 2.6 Ghz Celeron CPU, and I maxed out the RAM to 2 gigs. It has a built-in Broadcom wifi chip that works just fine.
A number of distros, including Bodhi and Linux Lite, boot fairly quickly and run reasonably well. But when it comes to web browsing, the thing slows to a crawl. This goes for Firefox and Chromium. Is this just some architectural bottleneck in the laptop or might I be missing something.
Thanks in advance!

Have you tried a lighter weight browser, such as Midori, or a text browser, such as w3m or links? I'd be curious to know it they were similarly slower than on other machines.

Good idea - the specs I found said 64Meg video RAM - no doubt shared. Modern browsers expect some help rendering all the crap they have to support.

It's just a dog, get used to it ... :shrug:

the bottleneck is the internet of 2019.
no, you can't do much about it.
it gets a little better with a lighter browser (FF + chrom/e/ium are the behemoths out there) - so try midori or falkon or dillo or palemoon or or or..., or if you do not need fancy graphics and javascript, try one of the text browsers mentioned.
enable adblocking - it helps with resources.
use a selective javascript enabling/blocking addon like uMatrix or noscript.

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Perhaps you should stop using that desktop background showing a picture of a lettuce?

I completely agree with the others - browsers are extremely demanding nowadays.

Out of interest though, given that a number of computers have passed through your hands, does this particular machine work significantly slower during browsing than others you've had with very similar specs?

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I have a 1150 with a 2.8GHz P4. But only 512MB of RAM. I used to use it to watch youtube while I gamed on more beefy hardware (not that much more, 2x 2GHz cores 2GB ram). But the ADs on sites + javascript made it unusable for that a couple years ago. So yeah, it's the internet of 2019. About all you could do is install an AD Blocker. And perhaps disable javascript (which would break the internet of 2019). Even with a very light desktop of CWM, you just cannot browse the web on less than 4GB (8GB?) RAM these days. More than that and you can put the .mozilla and .cache stuff on a RAM disk and maybe enjoy the web again. Not likely on that hardware.

That being said, I've had a few laptops where if you were running on battery and the battery got low, it would throttle down a very noticeable amount. So check that you've got the right power cord and hopefully it's not one that draws from the battery while under load, even though it's plugged in. Most laptop batteries are toast after 3 years. And the fans die in about a year if you actually use them under load.

I'm running a slightly older Inspiron 1100 (the 1150's fore-runner) with a 2.6 GHz P4 and 1.5 GB RAM (Dell insist 1 GB max, but the Intel chipset will support up to 2 GB). I run Puppy Linux on it, along with the last, special SSE-only build that Moonchild Productions compiled for Palemoon - 27.9.4. It will run the current 28.5.0 (P4s were the first to market with SSE2s, which are mandatory for most current browsers), but the SSE-only build is kinder on the processor itself.

Even with the state of the modern web, it's pretty quick. About the only thing it gives me problems with is accessing my Google Drive a/c, but hey! whaddya expect?.....this IS Google we're talking about here, so.....

In case you're interested, I'd recommend giving either Precise 5.7.1 or Tahrpup 6.0.5 a look. And then use the 'portable' build I put together of Palemoon 27.9.4, which will run from anywhere (it's completely self-contained, with the profile directory contained within). You'll find it at the second of the 'package' links in my sig.

When you're running a machine this old, it's no good being a 'purist', and expecting main-stream distros to run well. Even by Linux standards, this is weak hardware here, so you've got to be sympathetic to its abilities (or lack thereof...) and work with it accordingly.


Mike.

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No youtube videos. But fast. In your case. for video web browsing.

Before I give up and consider it a total dog, I would see if I have access to a USB WIFI or ETH NIC. It might be a flaw in that WIFI chip. If using a wired connection or alternate WIFI adapter resolves the problem, then you will have learned something.

Ethernet is a lot less resource intensive than wifi. Part of the reason I ethernet and bridge wifi on a another device that only does that function. Plus it's simpler to get going on a fresh install. Just a lot of little things to maximize performance, but it's still a losing battle outside of emulating old dos games that ran on a 4MHz CPU.

Hey, Guys,
Thank you all so very much for your extremely generous and very helpful, insightful responses! I tried installing Midori under Linux Lite. It is definitely more nimble than either Chromium or Firefox – loads more quickly, etc. And, surprisingly, YouTube and other streaming video content actually played surprisingly well! Yes, it was certainly dropping some frames, but it was more than usable. The thing is, using Midori (that is, the really old version available in the Ubuntu repositories) I couldn't get any sound with the videos! I googled this problem, and someone suggested uninstalling Pulse Audio (which didn't sound quite right to me) or installing the latest, beta version of Midori, which I did. But the new version is running like a slug.
By the way, the reason I'm kind of fixated on streaming video for these machines is that I am giving them to students, and therefore, they have to be able to access things like Khan Academy and other educational content that a teacher might assign.
I will try using one of those standalone YouTube video viewers that someone mentioned, above.
Also, it's very strange, but, although Antix Linux has usually been my go to distro for really, really old hardware, it won't run properly on this machine! After the distribution has been installed on the hard drive, it won't boot – it only gets as far as a flashing cursor.
Anyway, at this point, I'm just trying to conquer the challenge of getting this thing to browse the web decently enough that I can give it to someone who needs it.
Thanks again for all the suggestions and I will continue to tinker with this and report back if I find something that works. By the way, thanks for the suggestion of trying one of the Puppy flavors. I haven't messed with Puppy in a while but I'll give it a try.

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@ rebbi:-

Further to my recommendation for Puppy on that 1150, there's a standalone Youtube viewer/downloader you could try, written in GTK+. The Puppy Forum thread for this can be found here:-

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=76835

The Github page is here:-

https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer

Hope that helps. It plays back through whatever your default installed media-player happens to be.....in Puppy's case, this is usually Gnome MPlayer, though I would recommend using norgo's packages of SMPlayer as a 'front-end' to MPlayer. It's a much more pleasant experience, and has a whole heap of extra features just not present in MPlayer itself.


Mike.

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In terms of watching YouTube videos, you could write GUI program that downloads a video from an entered URL and stream it to mpv.

There's an app for that.

Oh, nice!

That's command line-based program, though. If OP is refurbishing computers and giving them to unprivileged kids, a GUI program seems like an easy thing for them work with, assuming they aren't familiar with the terminal.