Old laptop need lite applications

avantra

Good morning,

I managed to get an old IBM Thinkpad 600 PII 266 mhz for my friend.
I bought it from the IT department at work for £25.

The laptop is very solid and came with win 2000 pro sp4 pre-installed + license.

The HDD is 20 Gig but the memory is only 128 meg. My friend need this laptop for internet and some office type work.

My question is: what LITE software (freeware) is out there for this kind of computer. I mean which applications will run fast and will not eat up resources that will slow him down.

I heard that Opera and Thunderbird are quiet lite but I struggle to find anything else.

Thanks

Avantra

Soulistic

You know what, you have struck gold with this question... In my quest for an ever faster computer, I try not to bog it down with the likes of Java applications such as LimeWire, or Azureus. Here is my list of things I have found not to be so taxing on your system resources (all freeware or opensource):

1. AntiVirus - Avast [https://www.avast.com] (Fast free antivirus that have do live updates)

2. Torrent - UTorrent [https://www.utorrent.com] (Lightweight, and just one file!)

3. Web Broswer - FireFox [https://www.mozilla.com/firefox] (Be careful with this one, because as you open more tabs, the larger it gets in system memory)

4. Email - Thunderbird [https://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/] (It's pretty stable, and light weight, but not my personal favourite)

5. IM - Gaim [http://gaim.sourceforge.net/] (Instead of having a cluster of different IM programs on your computer, just use one. This one is pretty good in the light weight area, but, might lack in features when compared to Trillian.)

6. Media Player - Windows Media Player Classic or VLC [http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ or https://www.videolan.org/vlc/] (The best media player... just make sure you download a codec pack too.. my suggestion would be KLite Basic Package)

7. Audio Player - Winamp Lite Edition [https://www.winamp.com] (Although the full version is very bloated, the lite version occupies very little memory, and it very good at what it does)

One thing you could do also is when you are installing drivers for devices, instead of installing the full fleged GUI application that comes with your device, just install the driver, and use Windows functionality for that device (ie. wireless network card).

You might also want to shut off unnecessary services... for a good guide to these, look at the following page, but, do this at your own risk! http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/defserv.htm

If I think of anything more than this, I will be sure to add it to this list.

gavinp

For a firewall program, Ghostwall works well on older machines and uses a small amount of memory:

http://www.ghostsecurity.com/index.php?page=ghostwall

Thanks

Gavin

avantra

To save on resources , I see that Opera has a built in mail client , Is it any good?

Darksun

I'm going to have to disagree with some of Soulistics suggestions. Firefox by design isn't a lightweight app, I find it too bloated for older systems and find Opera to be better. And for an audio player, foobar is much more lightweight than Winamp. A good word processor is AbiWord.

rrwfotr

You might find that if you upped the ram memory on the laptop your laptop would be able to deal with bigger applications. 128mb is way too small for a laptop running windows 2000. If you open the slot at the back of the laptop see if the ram chip you have is a single chip or two 64 sims. If it's one then you could upp the ram to 128 mb or even 256 mb. The upgrade wouldn't be that expensive and you would most def see an inscrease in perfmance. What you laptop is doing at the moment is writing stuff to cache memory on the disk which obv leads in disk IO which slows evey thing down. Ideally you want allot of stuff loaded into the memory thus making the laptop allot faster. Ebay might be a good place to look for second hand memory on the cheap. A good site to see what memory you laptop needs would be http://www.crucial.com you can then find out what you need and then get it cheaper else where!!! Hope this helps.

Soulistic

Darksun wrote:

I'm going to have to disagree with some of Soulistics suggestions. Firefox by design isn't a lightweight app, I find it too bloated for older systems and find Opera to be better. And for an audio player, foobar is much more lightweight than Winamp. A good word processor is AbiWord.

Thanks Darksun, I had completely forgotten about Foobar... and you are perfectly right, it is very liteweight when compared to Winamp. Also, with regards to AbiWord, there is also available Open Office, but, I'm not sure how lite weight that is.

rogerramjet

20gb is pretty big for a laptop with that processor spec, also the memory is pretty good as well ...even running win 2000.

Keep away from the newer word processing suites (Office XP, etc) and go for the office 97 suites and it will run fine.

Yo put into perspective, I've a toshiba laptop running a duel boot system of win xp and win 98 (for evaluation purposes only) the system is a celeron 600mhz with a 6gb HDD with 196mb ram.

In win 98 it flies...running agv antivirusand zone alarm. all other software, officee 97, IE, etc other software is basic windows crap, it runs fine

In Win XP (pro) it's running agv and zone alarm, office xp and all other crap as above it runs fine.

OK, I could put other "office" suites on which are less memory intensive but the difference on how things run for basic word processing/surfing the net is not that different from my Dell 1.7gb processor running 1gb ram.

If it's still out there look for claris works word processing package...comes on 3 floppy discs and for basic word processing without the whistles and bells would be suffice for most peoples needs

sra

Foxit instead of Adobe

Real alternative instead of Realplayer. I have Media Player Classic (that comes with Real alternative) as my default media player. - I use Itunes to manage my music but I like something really light for quick playing of media I've just dowloaded rather than launching something bigger.

Irfanview for Images

I also use a lot of Portable software wherever possible to keep my registry clear

sra

Forgot
http://www.tinyapps.org/

avantra

Thanks, well after reading all the above I made a package avoiding any bloatware and after installation and some testing it is running without much different than my AMD +2500xp desktop:

1. Opera (Firefox was slower than IE)
2. Open office 2.0 (little slow to load initially but fine after opening)
3. foobar2000 (faster than winamp on this one)
4. Alternative realplayer (will it work with the BBC?)
5. Alternative Quicktime
6. VlC media player
7. Java 1.5
8. Password Agent
9. Tiny firewall 2.1 (ghostwall was running slow on this machine)
10. Antivir anti-virus (again much faster than Avast on this platform)
11. Spybot
12. Acrobar 5.05 (foxit is crushing for some reason)
13. Picasa 2
14. Tugzip
15. Gaim
16. CCleaner

There is no DVD drive but other than that the speed is exellent for a 7 (?) years old laptop.

There is some opinion about bloatware here :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/05/gates_fat_software/