What distro for 12 year old laptop?
 

I have an Acer Extensa 5620 I bought in 2007. Its specs as follows

• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T5550
• 1.83GHz
• 3GB DDR2 (It takes a max of 4GB, I might be able to upgrade)
• Upto 358 MB Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100

I installed Ubuntu 16.04 on this based on minimum requirements but it's very slow.

I don't want to junk this just yet since it has a nice big display.

Would you recommend a suitable distro? I plan to use this to do some web browsing, watching VLC videos.

If possible I would like to to connect this to my flat screen TV and watch Youtube or Netflix or downloaded videos (via VLC). If not that's fine too.

I'd say AntiX. It's designed for antiques.

I have a Dell Inspiron with similar specs and am running Arcolinux, AntiX, Slackware 14.2, Debian Stretch and Buster on it and I'd say Slackware, antiX and Stretch/Buster are the best on it in terms of ram use, etc.

AntiX works well on older machines.

I use it on an old 2008 Toshiba Satellite, 1.2GHz Celeron processor, 2GB ram & running from an 8GB SDHC card. :)

(It's running on a couple of old netbooks too, as well as more modern desktop & laptop.)

That's not an antique from where I'm sitting! My oldest computer has a 1.6 GHz Pentium M and 2 GB of RAM. It runs Xubuntu well — antiX lacked some stuff I needed — and the only concession made to its age is to use Midori instead of Firefox.

Honestly, just about anything that doesn't touch Gnome will run fine. That's got sufficient specs to run pretty much anything else. Just find a DE/WM you like that's not Gnome, and a distro that has it available.

is it 64bit capable?

some distros are phasing out 32bit asupport...

i have a 2008 32bit laptop, and it runs well with debian stable. no gui at all.

All Core2's are 64-bit. The Core Duo/Solo was the last mainline chip that Intel released (Core x, Celeron, Pentium) that was 32-bit. EVERYTHING they've produced since the introduction of the first Core 2 is 64-bit.

^ interesting.
like i said, this laptop is from 2008 but it comes with a "Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 420 @ 1.60GHz" and definitely isn't 64bit capable, but apparently the same model was available with a core duo (which according to you wasn't 64bit either).

so in 2007 that other laptop must've been top notch.

I'm running Q4OS on a laptop from 2005.

I had problems installing antix after burning the iso to a DVD. it gave some error message about pin board and the keyboard and mouse were frozen.
So i downloaded and installed Xubuntu. That is definitely performing better than Ubuntu was. I have also downloaded and burnt Lubuntu to a disc. Will try that too.

Thank you

hey sumithar please try my spin of debian/slax
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...sb-4175650800/

Just run it as usb install or frugal install to hard drive, or play off cd
I can help with easy frugal install to hard drive boots/runs fast

I used to get that pinboard error too. I don't think it's significant. The frozen input is also something that happened to me once on a 32-bit machine, after a kernel upgrade. It turned out I needed the PAE version of the kernel to make the graphical interface work. Don't ask me why!

Is that a different download?

Shouldn't be! I would expect the installation disk to contain kernels suitable for all hardware, especially in a distro like AntiX. Anyway, it doesn't matter now as you seem to have found something that you like and that works for you.