Keeps my 10 year old laptop alive and thriving!
by fluxlizard
Just want to say a big thank you to the developers of PCLinuxOS Gnome Edition.
I'm running it smooth and fast on a laptop that's about 10 years old now. It's an IBM Thinkpad A21m, 700 mhz Pentium 3 processor, 256mb ram, 4mb video card. It has a sticker on it that says "designed for Microsoft Windows 98". Thanks to PCLinuxOS Gnome Edition, it runs quite fast, and everything I can throw at it from the repos runs very well (Open Office apps, GIMP, etc).
I tried everything I could find for this old laptop in the past including all the "light" versions of Ubuntu (like Fluxbuntu and Xubuntu), which were much much too slow on this old hardware. I used Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux but disliked them because they feel like hacked together distros with old kernels, apps, and libs, and they have a very small software selection. I used Zenwalk for a while and it was fast like PCLinuxOS Gnome Edition, but again the software selection in the repos was very small and using the repos was horribly chaotic- one has to select a repo, search through it for the app one is looking and if it isn't found, select the next repo, search through that, etc.
Then I found PCLinuxOS Gnome Edition 2008. It was fast on this old laptop and best of all, it had a full repo of thousands of software and Synaptic and used Gnome. It's a full featured distro that still worked very well on this old laptop.
I was a bit worried when 2009 edition came out. Would it be fast enough and light enough for the minimal specs on this old computer, or would I have to go back to using Zenwalk or Puppy?
I was delighted to find that not only does it still run on this old laptop, it actually has seen some speed improvements. This is especially true with DVD video and live online video, like YouTube or the news. Video is faster and smoother. In 2008, I had some sound problems from time to time but they are gone in 2009.
So a huge thank you! This old laptop has been a great investment. Thanks to PCLinuxOS Gnome Edition- it's still going strong 10 years on.
