For most of the old computer challenge week I mostly used it to hang out on IRC for a couple of days, I stuggled running many applications, even finding apparently 32 bit windows binaries they usually resulted in a "Not a valid win32 application" which I don’t fully understand but I’m assuming is down to missing dotnet runtime library or something like that. Then I went away on holiday so I had to cut short my experimentation.
When I got back I wanted to make up for lost time so I decided to try upgrading the original 160GB HDD for a spare 120GB SSD I have lying around. This involved opening up the netbook bottom, which gave me an opportunity to remove years of dust and poignantly, a few hairs from my old dog. The CPU fan was clogged so I removed it for a thorough clean with a brush…
For most of the old computer challenge week I mostly used it to hang out on IRC for a couple of days, I stuggled running many applications, even finding apparently 32 bit windows binaries they usually resulted in a "Not a valid win32 application" which I don’t fully understand but I’m assuming is down to missing dotnet runtime library or something like that. Then I went away on holiday so I had to cut short my experimentation.
When I got back I wanted to make up for lost time so I decided to try upgrading the original 160GB HDD for a spare 120GB SSD I have lying around. This involved opening up the netbook bottom, which gave me an opportunity to remove years of dust and poignantly, a few hairs from my old dog. The CPU fan was clogged so I removed it for a thorough clean with a brush and replaced the CPU paste with some fresh gunk so it was good as new.
The SSD had a copy of Windows XP installed but it lacked most of the drivers since it didn’t come from the Samsung recovery image. I was bored with Windows though so I wanted to try Linux on this little laptop and looked at what my options were for a 32bit Linux distro in 2025, which it turns out are very limited.
I tried Puppy Linux first, specifically BookwormPup32 based on Debian, but it wouldn’t boot at all. I tried a few things to get it working but in the end gave up and moved onto Linux Mint Debian Edition, which I run on my main desktop PC.
I know by default this comes with Cinnamon and expected this to be far too heavy for the netbook but I believed that with some magical incantation I could install XFCE or something more lightweight. The Internet lied to me though and none of the commands seemed to work as the meta packages were not available anymore, or maybe ever were. As I expected running Cinnamon was very painful, every click came with trepidation knowing it would be some wait for the system to respond. I didn’t stick with it very long.
Next up was good old plain Debian, it has 32 bit images and I could install whatever desktop environment I could want with it, so long as I was happy with ugly default themes. I set up the installer and went to bed because it was in for a long night, even with the SSD it was already clear the HDD was the least of the performance bottlenecks. By the morning it was done and I decided to install LXQT because it has a reputation for running on older hardware and this reputation was well deserved. LXQT runs like a dream on this netbook, every click is responsive and the whole system feels snappy, you’d almost forget you were running it on a potato, so long as you don’t go on the Internet.
I haven’t done too much with it so far, a bit of text editing and YouTube just for a laugh (it managed about 10 fps with a lot of drops). I also tried the default installed Quassel IRC client but setting this up was anything but smooth. I’ll still persist with it for now, as the "there is no challenge" theme goes, I don’t feel restricted into just the official week, I’ll spread it out as long as I have time for.