Question Which OS best for older laptop?

[alphacoyle]

I have an older hp9600 business laptop, works fine, 17" screen full size keyboard etc, but pentium 4 3.2ghz & 2gb ram limiting it's abilities so I'm wondering if there's a different OS that'd use less resources but be usable for general pc usage (I'd be putting this in my 9yr old's room to help him transition from android touchscreen tablet to pc so the OS needs to have administrator controls so I can direct what can be done on it; and it needs to be able to work with general sites. I'm thinking maybe some type of linux based?

 

[COLGeek]

You are going to need to run one of the "lite" versions of Linux on that old beast. Something like Puppy Linux should work well.

 

[alphacoyle]

You are going to need to run one of the "lite" versions of Linux on that old beast. Something like Puppy Linux should work well.

That looks good. Do you think youtube videos would run less resources than it's current windows xp? I notice the laptop working hard sometimes when they are playing.

 

[COLGeek]

The difference will be negligible, I would think. You won't really know until you try the chosen OS on your particular hardware.

 

[MDTOP]

Alphacoyle,
Before you clear OS I would increase Ram to max if you can still find and it's not to pricey. Also Remove all the bloatware that may be on the machine, Weather bug, news feeds,etc.... Uninstall all programs that use the internet other than the browser you use. Connect via Cat5 cable and see if it's faster, Windows XP setting up wireless connections were troublesome if I recall.

 

[venuspa]

I've tried debian linux on low end machines. Its extremely lightweight compared to Ubuntu and its amazingly fast and fully performant. May be you can try out debian.

 

[utubeagrawal]

a nice basic linux OS in my opinion would be Zorin OS - they even have a lite version for older machines.
They are quite user friendly so a 9 year old should be able to work with it - there is little use for terminal unless you are going to be installing chrome.

I had my cousins on it over the summer so I have had a similar application.

It is much more user friendly than debian and ubuntu in my opinion.

 

[alphacoyle]

a nice basic linux OS in my opinion would be Zorin OS - they even have a lite version for older machines.
They are quite user friendly so a 9 year old should be able to work with it - there is little use for terminal unless you are going to be installing chrome.

I had my cousins on it over the summer so I have had a similar application.

It is much more user friendly than debian and ubuntu in my opinion.

That sounds good, and it's able to work with the various school applications; and is actually user friendly? In a unix based os that'd be key.