Hey!
All of you who own one of those pc's or laptops that came with a sticker saying "Designed for Windows 95", (ok that's pushing it, mine says Windows 98 ) this is the place for you!
I actually own a pretty recent Desktop (two years) that supports Beryl and such..but the darn monitor died on me, and I had to run for my until now hobby 8 year old laptop. I started recovering it for the fun of it, I actually spent a little too much money on it buying a new battery and RAM chip (you wouldn't believe how expensive old parts can be) and right now it's running surprisingly fast!
I can do all of the basic stuff, I can even play media from my ipod! (My music is stuck in my desktop) Of course that doesn't make much sense, since I can use my headphones...Anyway, the only thing this baby can't do well is watching videos (Youtube videos get choppy) but I even got to enable some transparency for show off it's only for the screenshots though...
Here are my specs:
8 year old Toshiba Satellite 4060CDT
128MB RAM
333Mhz
3,7GB HD
Trident Graphics card
Ubuntu Feisty Server running Fluxbox (i had 3 WM installed at once, last week )
This is supposed to be a place where we share applications/solutions meant to be light and responsive on an old computer. This is one of the many reasons why I love Linux: your computer doesn't have to be top notch to run a fully up to date system.
You can also share Window Managers, Distributions, anything you want
Right now I'm using Galeon/Seamonkey as the Web Browser, and they are really responsive. Galeon spends a little more RAM, but it renders pages much faster, and it's very responsive, and it uses my GTK theme, so that's a bonus.
As a file manager I chose PCManFM, and I just love it. It's very very responsive, and the interface is very intuitive, it's a bit like Thunar.
MSN Client: Pidgin. It's hard to find light graphical MSN clients. Now or then I use centericq though, but I actually don't need to. Since i trim down in everything else, at least I can spend something in my messenger, and Pidgin is not a hog at all.
Media Player: every once in a while someone will send me videos in msn, and I use xine to watch them (xine-ui package), and I use XMMS for my music, but I don't use them much.
Right now, conky marks 57% RAM used with a web browser, a file manager, and a messenger client running, and my system is not laggy at all!
Cheers
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