newbie wants to know about older laptops

chstani · 09-21-2005, 04:19 AM

Hi, i`ve got Compaq Armada 700 laptop: P3 700 MHz, 128 ram. so it is not the newest laptop for sure. So, i tried Vector linux and now SuSe.
Vector linux uses Xfce, Fluxbox and some other desktop environments. Xfce and Fluxbox works fine on my laptop.
SuSe uses KDE and it is slow on my computer.

So, I want to ask, is it just desktop environment that slows computer?
I mean, if in SuSe i change KDE to Xfce, will I get the same working computer that was with Vector??

maybe someone can recommed me some really user-friendly and not so heavy distro?

spooon · 09-21-2005, 05:18 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by chstani
So, I want to ask, is it just desktop environment that slows computer?

Well, desktop environments generally need huge amounts of RAM; and 128MB isn't that much RAM. I don't think the distribution matters that much.

Fritz_Monroe · 09-21-2005, 06:35 AM

If you change SUSE to use XFCE, it should perform faster than with KDE, but it may or not be as fast as with Vector. They are not the same distro. I believe both are based on Slackware, but since their philosophy is different, I would think that SUSE would not be as fast as Vector. From what I've read, Vector was created to be fast and work on older hardware. SUSE was created to be easy to install and use. While these could result in the same product, it would most likely end in SUSE being more bloated than Vector.

F_M

Paul8032 · 09-21-2005, 08:09 AM

Hi chstani,

I have Vector & I find it a pretty good distro. I would recommend it as a good distro for your needs - fast and user-friendly. Their website also has a very friendly forum (although this forum is certainly very good). I would endorse the previous comments that changing SUSe to XfCE would make it much quicker, but maybe not quite as quick as Vector/XfCE.

Have you considered IceWM?

Regards,
Paul

chstani · 09-21-2005, 12:58 PM

Thank you all, i`m searching now for some distros.
And about Vector linux - i don`t think i will try it again, I had a lot of problems with it, i have here some topics. I can`t do simple things with it, like printing, writing text in NON-english, and i spend a week to get sound card working!!! The positive side of Vector linux is that it has nice desktop environments and i can choose between some of them, IceWM is nice too!

Maybe some more recommendation about distros, I need small, light and user friendly distro (i`m newbie

)