Okay so my grandpa's computer is an old eMachines t6212

Okay so my grandpa's computer is an old eMachines t6212

Has an Athlom 3200+, 160 gig hard drive, and about 512 mb of ddr sdram. It's a fucking dinosaur. Shit won't even load most webpages on Windows XP.

I've gotten hold of a bit newer machine and took windows off of it, replacing it with the latest version of Linux Mint. The PC has two gigs of ram, a dual core e2180 from Intel, and integrated graphics.

Really he just needs to browse the internet and maybe play some kinda little game to give him something else to do like he did on his old machine.

Problem is (sorry I took so long to get here) that this machine is still a bit sluggish despite Linux utilizing the components a bit better. What can I do to speed the machine up further? I just want to get him a solid browsing experience and this machine (while quite a few years old) really shouldn't be having these issues. I've got an Nvidia 8600 in a second machine that probably won't work in here due to needing half height slots. Is there anything I can do? Or is there a processor in this socket that I should be using instead?

Furthermore, what is the least CPU intensive browser I can have him use? Is Firefox still a good choice?

Please help me out, Sup Forums
Pic related is the old on left newer PC on the right

Other urls found in this thread:

ark.intel.com/products/91831/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N3160-2M-Cache-up-to-2_24-GHz
cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Celeron-N3150-vs-Intel-Celeron-G1820/m28103vs1992
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

You can get a better CPU in that one pretty cheaply.

>e2180
and 2 more gigs of ram too

nigga i use a pentium 4 with arch and does basically anything. sure it can't play hd video in youtube but meh.

looking up you can buy a core 2 quad that also uses the 775 socket. there must be a half height pci-e x1 videocard you could fit. any videocard from the last 5 years would have no problem running internet shit smoothly

Install XP, is a lot faster than most distros.

install q4os

Install Damn Small Linux

>Install Gento
Or other sort of Ubuntu, with XFCE or better LXDE, and surf the web even with Chrome...
And yeah, find a two 1 gig RAM sticks, to make 2 gigs of RAM...

Core 2 quad is about thirty bucks, right? I was going to look for a bigger ram kit since adding two more sticks isn't possible on the newer motherboard.

On graphics cards I really only have experience with like higher end newer stuff. I don't need to get anything crazy but I don't want to skimp and get something that runs like shit

No browsers have support for shit on xp anymore. It flat out refused to load webpages because the coding on them was too new for the latest versions of the browsers you can get on xp

It's got two 1 gig sticks right now. Gonna try and find two 2 gig sticks if possible.

Right now I've got zero invested in the PC besides an hour to set the thing up so I'm trying to stay easy on the costs. Thanks for the input so far guys, it does mean a lot.

Solus

>It's got two 1 gig sticks right now. Gonna try and find two 2 gig sticks if possible.
They are DDR1, right? 2gigs were very rare.
If it is DDR2, you can find even 4gigs ones.

Install Lubuntu, or try it on flash drive.
It was able to make use of 478 socket celerons back in 2015 with nearly-the-same internet. Even youtube played normally.

brother!

I thought dsl was a ded distro

That digital media manager thing as well as the cases itself must be a semi standard thing as my old gateway case looks similar. In fact the case front panel connectors, audio and usb where all standard and modern parts dropped in with no issue

Forgot to post pic

You can get a q6600 for $10.

I'm talking about putting ram in the newer one. It's DDR2 and only has two slots since it's so small. I may have a four gig kit at home that would work but I'm not certain. I'm that user that had that Silverstone case a couple days ago. Turns out I scored big for the $10 I paid on it lmao

Also
Brethren!

I used xubuntu on my old toaster laptop that had 500 mb of ram. Was able to at least browse stuff.

a 4GB kit in that system would be optimal. it's about the minimum I would ever think about using in a system that is going to interface with the modern web

Fuck they were probably all made in the same factory on different assembly lines.

Can't you get him a slightly better machine? I mean, some old quad core that is not that expensive, with some awesome gigs of ddr2/3 ram, 500gb/1tb hd and maybe a low end but newer card?
A LGA775 could support a core 2 quad, if a 'new' older machine isn't an option.

eMachines kind-of merged with Gateway in 2004

>t. brainlet who didn't read the whole OP

lubuntu. A better CPU would help too

A buddy is going to look at his office for any spare DDR2 and he might be able to score me a q6600 either for free or for cheap. I'm not looking to troubleshoot a bunch of stuff with a distro like lubuntu or Gentoo. Are they both more or less "set and forget" and windows enough for an old man to easily grasp? I've only ever used vanilla Ubuntu and Mint in my life.

Lubuntu is just Ubuntu with LXDE, it just werks

Install Gentoo...seriously. It might use up some time compiling everything, but you can make a minimalistic featherweight distro with a custom kernel that allows it to boot in record time and then install some nice looking, easy to use desktop environment like XFCE. Your grandpa can also use Thunar as a file explorer and Mousepad as a file editor. For the compilation flags, I recommend -O2 -march=native as a personal preference. If you can get a bit more of ram he can also use Chromium as a web browser, as it eats more memory but runs lighter on the CPU. But as a general afvice, get better hardware. I know this is a meme but with old hardware like this one, you should really go for the speed. LibreOffice for the documents and a nice login manager so he doesn't need to touch the TTY that is probably alien for him.

don't install gentoo

>tfw your father still has your first PC and uses it till this day
My first pc was a t5212 I believe was the model number, I keep telling him to get a new pc already. I want it back to do a sleeper build.

Somewhat unrelated, but I got a pile of trade-ins from a friend who owns a PC repair shop. One was a 650MHz Pentium 3 with 128MB RAM, and the date tag said the owner took it in in 2016. I think I win the oldest PC in active use contest.

Hell that one he was on wasn't his first but close to it. The one I gave him was my first PC I bought for myself at a store. It worked great for quite a few years but now it's just awful

He really doesn't store anything on the actual harddisk besides maybe one picture for his background and a text document with some login info. Everything else is all done online for him.

I'd like to get better hardware and I'm trying to get the core 2 quad acquired with some ram but a whole new build or buying something from Wally world is out of the question I just don't have that kind of disposable income at the moment

Buy a cheap chinese SSD from Aliexpress.

This should bring significant improvement to the speed.

USED THINKPAD

kek
>spend or sped $200 on a laptop
retard

Get a core2 duo e8400 or better unless you can find documentation on the motherboard to check for compatability. Some OEM 775 motherboards don't support core2 quads. Also 4 gigs of DDR2/3 should be plenty for him.

Your poor grandpa doesnt want to have to figure out your shitty neckbeard loonix meme

You might try that one again. Little less condescending this time. It's really not needed.

Install Lubuntu on it with two icons on the desktop. Chromium with ublock origin, and a link to the downloads folder. Maybe a word processor. Enable auto update. Problem solved.

I can't say I could recommend any single core CPU these days. baseline for doing basic tasks is core 2.
I tried with a pentium M 755 (2 GHz) (similar benchmark on cpumark as your athlon XP 3200+, 433 vs 466 on cpumark) and it's just sluggish with firefox on XP classic interface (always 100% CPU - I've always said javascript killed the internet, but nobody noticed on their overclocked core i7 8700k or ryzen). the only thing it's good for would be lightweight games or typing office documents.

OP here. I remember the good 'ol days when that was a fast machine for everything. 2006scape and midis, emo rock bands and fucking counter strike classic.

Sad to think that stuff literally doesn't load on that machine because it couldn't physically handle it anymore.

I think I'll be happy if I can get the newer one to operate without freeze ups though.
Sounds like a q6600 and four gigs of RAM should solve my issue

That other guy probably isn't wrong. If the new OS is too different from XP the grandpa might not want to use it. Can whatever linux distro OP wants be set up to mimic XP's style and layout? If not good luck with the shitty neckbeard loonix.

This. It's very lightweight compared to Mint. I have it on my laptop that has 2gb of ram and a quad core celeron and it works perfectly. It's worth trying out. It only uses from 100-200 mb of ram when it's idling.

>I think I win the oldest PC in active use contest.
Hardly. There are millions of low-spec (for today) computers all over the world doing industrial stuff day-in/day-out.

Oldish computers are popular in small CNC shops as many CNC lathes and plotters are run off parallel port.

Cheapest way is to reformat to a good XP modified edition and add a ReadyBoost USB key.

Adding RAM will help a bit, but adding a cheap SSD to install the system on will be a hell of an improvement IMHO

>Has an Athlom 3200+, 160 gig hard drive, and about 512 mb of ddr sdram. It's a fucking dinosaur. Shit won't even load most webpages on Windows XP.
>I've gotten hold of a bit newer machine and took windows off of it, replacing it with the latest version of Linux Mint. The PC has two gigs of ram, a dual core e2180 from Intel, and integrated graphics.

Both of those machines are roughly of the same era, thus they are going to be barely different.

IMO the best way to help your pops is to:

1. Get the fastest socket 939 CPU there is ( that would be opteron 185, methinks )

2. Fill all the memory slots with as much as memory as it can take. DDR SDRAM sticks are available in 1gig modules and they go for $2 or less. I recently got myself two of those. Check how many memory slots the board has.

3. Get him a bootable SSD and migrate XP to it. 16 gigs is sufficient and it will make the machine MUCH snappier. If you want to splurge - get 60gig SSD, migrate XP and install windows 7 as an upgrade with all settings.

You can probably get a better/more modern machine at the cost of the upgrade, but I'd hazard a notion that your pops is not a hardware masturbator, would like his old environment intact and does not care if yahoo loads 2 seconds faster.

What I see as a bottleneck in this machine is the minuscule amount of memory. 512 MB was fine in 2001, but these days it is not enough to browse the internet. If the machine you are upgrading has 4 memory slots, then merely filling those with as much memory as possible will make the machine work much better.

I have a workstaton with 1.8ghz opterons which works perfectly even on shit laden webpages, but it has 32gigs of memory. CPU is not that important.

OK. I googled the machine and its MB. It seems to have 4 memory slots and PCI Express slot.

Confirm before upgrading, but to this:

1. Get maximum amount of memory to it. 4x1gig DDR1 is cheap af. This will help immensly. Board offically supports 1gig modules, but should take 2gig as well. Most boards handle bigger modules then advertised.

2. When memory is installed, migrate the system to windows 7 to get modern browser support. See how that works.

3. If necessary, add SSD and a faster CPU. There is headroom to do that.

One last thing. I forgot. Some sites now (YT for example) use OpenCL to render shit. It is beneficial to add a graphics card that supports it natively. Such as Radeon HD240, and older GeForce or whatnot.

Linux Mint,

The Linux with most system requirements, you came from reddit right?

if you have PCIe then suck the dick of whoever put it there because it just saved your ass, AGP is a pain in the ass because the best you can get are the ATi HD 4xxx series and the agp variant are expensive as fuck (for a budget build), but with PCIe you can put the cheapest GT 610/710 you can find to decode h264 and with x264ify extention you can force youtube so the GPU do all the task, so you could watch 1080@30fps with no issue. And if it's 1.1 then you could even try a 3.0 gpu like the 1030 that have VP9 hardware decode, but the cost wouldn't be "that" cheap.

Also with 4gb you're perfect, even 3gb is fine if you go for a 32 bits OS, put a cheap SSD (128gb should be enough, if not 64gb) and that's it.

Get him a new laptop op (lot of clearance sales this month's) and secondary display...that shit you want to upgrade are old as fuck.

This.

Essentially - spend ~$50 on that old box and it will run like hell in whatever your ancestor does on it.

- 4 gigs of memory - $10
- dual core athlon 64 socket 939 - $10
- proper PCIE GPU - $30

optionally

- SSD - $whatever

grandpa won't need to. Rename the web-browser to internet, give him a speed dial to facebook, google, and old people daily and he will be fine

>doesn't load webpages
user error
reinstall brain

Buy him an iPad or tablet.

>two gigs of ram

3Gb is minimum these days.

>quad core celeron
how

The celeron n3160
ark.intel.com/products/91831/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N3160-2M-Cache-up-to-2_24-GHz

I was confused at first as well lmao

Why the fuck they named that Atom a Celeron
cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Celeron-N3150-vs-Intel-Celeron-G1820/m28103vs1992