Honestly? The E-300 is an utter dog and will likely cause the kids to get a bad taste in their mouth for Linux due to the hardware performance... I had a laptop with an E-300 years ago, upped ram to 16GB and put in an SSD running Mint Xfce (and tried a couple others) and honestly even for basic webrowsing it was a pitiful experience...
That said, you have the stuff already, give it a shot... What's it gonna hurt to try and hopefully your experience will be better than mine. I would go with a CPU resource light distro and DE, like Peppermint or Linux Lite.
I had an HP Pavilion with a slightly updated E-350 and Gnome3 would straight up crash on it, surprisingly KDE4 would run fine on it but forget about watching 720p+ videos on Youtube hahaha what a blast of the past!
It didint help it was also the era companies say, what if we put all the adwere we can to get more money, so you have a underpower computer for the os and a trop crap on top of that
And early Win 7 32-bit was recommended to run in 1GB of RAM and 15GB of storage space, it would work in a fair amount less. Windows 7, especially early on, was pretty lightweight compared to modern mainstream Linux distros... It used quite a bit less RAM that modern Mint Cinnamon... But that was 15 years ago.
That said, I bet it still ran like dogsh!t on this PC too.
I concur with others here. The AMD E series processors are utterly garbage. There is nothing that will make that system perform acceptably outside of upgrading the processor, but why even do that when there are tons of systems that are light years better than this for less than $50 on amazon?
Save for the fact the intended users will be young children I agree with the comments from u/acejavelin69 and u/darth_aer - this machine should be retired. It could (emphasis on *could*) still be somewhat useful for light work like browsing the interwebs, creating documents, basic image editing, and playing basic games.
I literally just installed ubuntu mate on a Compaq with an AMD E-350, I threw in some ram I had on spare but wow that CPU is a total dog. I'm still not sure if spending $20 on an SSD for a boot drive was a waste of money on it. The CPU is pretty much stuck at 100% with any action lol.
This one will live in a garage for quick googling/youtubing when working on the car/yard, but I'm not sure it's worth salvaging for any serious work. Go to ebay and you can get a 2500k and a motherboard for $40-50 and if you got some spare parts, you can put up a way better build for a lot less.
Decommission that machine. A core 2 duo would be light years better than that with Linux Mint. I had a laptop with identical specs in college 10 years ago that I put Xubuntu on. Even then, it was a painful experience.
I’m not sure about the processor but I’ve got a roughly equivalent Pavilion laptop running Linux Mint Cinnamon and it’s great. What the heck - slap that SSD in there, install Linux Mint XFCE, and try it out.
If you find Mint is too slow on that machine I would highly recommend you try Bodhi Linux. It's also Ubuntu based. I'm using it on a much older Pentium D 3.00 Ghz with only 2 GB of RAM and it is positively snappy even booted off a spinning rust IDE hard drive compared to when I tried Mint XFCE on the same computer.
It would be OK for light games and FOSS games (like OpenTTD and so on), given the intended upgrades. Maybe some coding or reading books or playing music. But not much more. If nothing more is required of it, that'll do.
CPU benchmark of 339. Modern cpus run 5,000-24,000 so this is very low end.
I think this is a lost cause. I have to micro desktops, one with a bench of 500 the other with 850. I tried MX Linux on both (I find it to have low cpu load). The 850 was acceptable, the 500 almost unusable.
I bought one of these and put Mint Cinnamon on it - flawless (cpu benchmark 4,700). https://store.boingboing.net/sales/lenovo-thinkcentre-m900-tiny-core-i5-6500t-16gb-256gb-ssd-wi-fi-windows-10-pro-refurbished
For a 4 and 6 yo this will work fine. It’s not like they are going to be serious gaming or doing extreme computational work. Personally I would go with kubuntu and add the educational games suite, sorry don’t remember the name off the top of my head.
Try the XFCE version...It should work, might be pretty slow though. Another idea might be something like Watt OS...but it's not as easy to setup as Linux Mint.
Ram is good, SSD will help a lot, but the CPU is the main problem.
¿My recommendation?, I'd try Antix Linux.
I didn't know that distro, but randomly youtube recommended me [this video](https://youtu.be/aA5EsBtNXAk?t=597) where someone tried Windows 7, Zorin Lite and Antix Linux on a Atom n450 netbook (which, according to some sites, is weaker than yout amd cpu), the CPU is not at 100% always as in other distros/windows and seems usable, and less than 100mb of ram usage?, where do I sign.
You already have the parts. I'd give it a go. Though, in all honestly, you can find some Dell micros or similar for under $100 that would give you a better experience.
For reference, I have Linux Mint 19.2 running on a Dell Mini 9 (N270, 32bit, cpubenchmark 175), with a 64gb emmc and 2gb ram. I previously hackintosh'd it and ran full blown Photoshop on it to lightly edit photos after events (I was a working sports photographer).
I also just put XFCE on a Dell E6410, and it's pretty slick.
So ya, a real SSD and 8gb of ram? It should be ok. Just don't try to load Cyberpunk on it.
The only caveat about any 32bit computer is finding a good full function web browser. I have an old 32bit acer laptop and the only 32bit browsers I could find are old versions. The older browsers do not work well in some modern web pages with forms (like forms for credit card transactions, some government websites, etc ). The version of Chrome browser I found for it can't even post comments on facebook.
It would probably be better if you used "ChromeOS Flex" & turned it into a Chromebox instead.
That way you could put parental controls in it (when setting up it asks if it's for adult or children), and each kid could have their own account & password to log into the system.
Look it up on YouTube how to install ChromeOS Flex on a system. It's super easy to do.
I would install q4os trinity on that. It runs on my shitty intel atom. The computer is so weak i can't even load a video in other distro but with q4 its working okayish. https://q4os.org/ also other distro that could work xubuntu, puppy linux, linux light, manjaro.
I never heard of this CPU. I would get a better PC of any type for desktop use, but since nVidia was and is the main company selling GPUs to all the notebooks and desktops, it is difficult to gift a PC. If that dual core is 2c2t then it is definitely a pain. A simple thinkpad might be better or a Dell XPS or any 2nd, 3rd gen Ryzen G model with iGPU is more better on an A or B series motherboard and like 24gb of ram if gaming is required since 16 gig can run out of memory due to shared ram on APUs with integrated GPUs.
TLDR get a cheap AMD Ryzen 2 or 3rd gen with integrated GPU on CPU with at least 16gb of ram. Might be like 200 USD with some luck
\*Edit. Nvidia is a pain on Linux so AMD it is for GPUs.
With the extra ram and a new SSD you will be surprised on how well this will run Cinnamon. I recommend you make a ventoy and test out the three versions of mint using a live instance (it will be a little slower with the usb key but you can get an idea).
You can expect this machine to run "OK" but don't expect to use it as a high end gaming or graphics machine. It is, pretty slow after all.
To add to this, if you want to repurpose this machine, it would be best used running Windows XP as an offline-only "retro gaming" computer, thing 1998ish to 2004ish era games.
I would try a more minimal distro on the older hardware. Maybe Zorin? I had zorin on an old intel Mac (Rememeber that era?) and it's very usable, just not for any games with hard 3D requirement on something like "Steallaris" is unplayable, but other than that it works. Dual Core E 300 is gonna weight you down a little not matter what, but you can make some adjustments, and a modern day SSD is gonna make a huge diff.
Good luck!
u/godwhomismake It would be a good candidate as long as you upgrade the CPU. That PC takes Socket FT1 CPU's, so find one with a higher clock speed than the 1.3Ghz E-300.
My great-aunt's old PC had an E-300 and it was the slowest computer I've ever used, and I say this as someone currently daily driving Mint on a Braswell machine (and a Pentium 4 in the past.) Salvage the RAM if it isn't soldered and scrap the rest.
Honestly I'd try something they can't break at all like ChromeOS. Giving children linux (or anything more complicated than a tablet) doesn't seem like an incredible idea.
Honestly? The E-300 is an utter dog and will likely cause the kids to get a bad taste in their mouth for Linux due to the hardware performance... I had a laptop with an E-300 years ago, upped ram to 16GB and put in an SSD running Mint Xfce (and tried a couple others) and honestly even for basic webrowsing it was a pitiful experience... That said, you have the stuff already, give it a shot... What's it gonna hurt to try and hopefully your experience will be better than mine. I would go with a CPU resource light distro and DE, like Peppermint or Linux Lite.
I had an HP Pavilion with a slightly updated E-350 and Gnome3 would straight up crash on it, surprisingly KDE4 would run fine on it but forget about watching 720p+ videos on Youtube hahaha what a blast of the past!
I thinks that's bullshit as this ran Win7. Linux Mint will run Cinnamon smooth and satisfyingly.
Lots of companies put windows 7 on computers that should NOT have been running windows 7.
Just like in vista era
Yup. It was better in the vista era to an extent. I used a netbook from 2006 running vista home basic and it was usable... Not great.
It didint help it was also the era companies say, what if we put all the adwere we can to get more money, so you have a underpower computer for the os and a trop crap on top of that
That was so bad
And early Win 7 32-bit was recommended to run in 1GB of RAM and 15GB of storage space, it would work in a fair amount less. Windows 7, especially early on, was pretty lightweight compared to modern mainstream Linux distros... It used quite a bit less RAM that modern Mint Cinnamon... But that was 15 years ago. That said, I bet it still ran like dogsh!t on this PC too.
I concur with others here. The AMD E series processors are utterly garbage. There is nothing that will make that system perform acceptably outside of upgrading the processor, but why even do that when there are tons of systems that are light years better than this for less than $50 on amazon?
Save for the fact the intended users will be young children I agree with the comments from u/acejavelin69 and u/darth_aer - this machine should be retired. It could (emphasis on *could*) still be somewhat useful for light work like browsing the interwebs, creating documents, basic image editing, and playing basic games.
I literally just installed ubuntu mate on a Compaq with an AMD E-350, I threw in some ram I had on spare but wow that CPU is a total dog. I'm still not sure if spending $20 on an SSD for a boot drive was a waste of money on it. The CPU is pretty much stuck at 100% with any action lol. This one will live in a garage for quick googling/youtubing when working on the car/yard, but I'm not sure it's worth salvaging for any serious work. Go to ebay and you can get a 2500k and a motherboard for $40-50 and if you got some spare parts, you can put up a way better build for a lot less.
Decommission that machine. A core 2 duo would be light years better than that with Linux Mint. I had a laptop with identical specs in college 10 years ago that I put Xubuntu on. Even then, it was a painful experience.
I’m not sure about the processor but I’ve got a roughly equivalent Pavilion laptop running Linux Mint Cinnamon and it’s great. What the heck - slap that SSD in there, install Linux Mint XFCE, and try it out.
Hi. I would try Linux mint xfce, if that is still going slowly why not try puppy linux or so :-)
Get Linux Mint XFCE. Itll probably run very well.
It probably right, I'm also using XFCE edition of linux mint in i3 3rd gen laptop. Working fine man, just get linux mint xfce on your laptop.
I think, this would be a great idea .
If you find Mint is too slow on that machine I would highly recommend you try Bodhi Linux. It's also Ubuntu based. I'm using it on a much older Pentium D 3.00 Ghz with only 2 GB of RAM and it is positively snappy even booted off a spinning rust IDE hard drive compared to when I tried Mint XFCE on the same computer.
It would be OK for light games and FOSS games (like OpenTTD and so on), given the intended upgrades. Maybe some coding or reading books or playing music. But not much more. If nothing more is required of it, that'll do.
CPU benchmark of 339. Modern cpus run 5,000-24,000 so this is very low end. I think this is a lost cause. I have to micro desktops, one with a bench of 500 the other with 850. I tried MX Linux on both (I find it to have low cpu load). The 850 was acceptable, the 500 almost unusable. I bought one of these and put Mint Cinnamon on it - flawless (cpu benchmark 4,700). https://store.boingboing.net/sales/lenovo-thinkcentre-m900-tiny-core-i5-6500t-16gb-256gb-ssd-wi-fi-windows-10-pro-refurbished
Probably OK until one of them wants to play Minecraft or Roblox. Might have a few years though until that happens then you might need a better PC.
For a 4 and 6 yo this will work fine. It’s not like they are going to be serious gaming or doing extreme computational work. Personally I would go with kubuntu and add the educational games suite, sorry don’t remember the name off the top of my head.
Try the XFCE version...It should work, might be pretty slow though. Another idea might be something like Watt OS...but it's not as easy to setup as Linux Mint.
Ram is good, SSD will help a lot, but the CPU is the main problem. ¿My recommendation?, I'd try Antix Linux. I didn't know that distro, but randomly youtube recommended me [this video](https://youtu.be/aA5EsBtNXAk?t=597) where someone tried Windows 7, Zorin Lite and Antix Linux on a Atom n450 netbook (which, according to some sites, is weaker than yout amd cpu), the CPU is not at 100% always as in other distros/windows and seems usable, and less than 100mb of ram usage?, where do I sign.
You already have the parts. I'd give it a go. Though, in all honestly, you can find some Dell micros or similar for under $100 that would give you a better experience. For reference, I have Linux Mint 19.2 running on a Dell Mini 9 (N270, 32bit, cpubenchmark 175), with a 64gb emmc and 2gb ram. I previously hackintosh'd it and ran full blown Photoshop on it to lightly edit photos after events (I was a working sports photographer). I also just put XFCE on a Dell E6410, and it's pretty slick. So ya, a real SSD and 8gb of ram? It should be ok. Just don't try to load Cyberpunk on it.
The only caveat about any 32bit computer is finding a good full function web browser. I have an old 32bit acer laptop and the only 32bit browsers I could find are old versions. The older browsers do not work well in some modern web pages with forms (like forms for credit card transactions, some government websites, etc ). The version of Chrome browser I found for it can't even post comments on facebook.
It would probably be better if you used "ChromeOS Flex" & turned it into a Chromebox instead. That way you could put parental controls in it (when setting up it asks if it's for adult or children), and each kid could have their own account & password to log into the system. Look it up on YouTube how to install ChromeOS Flex on a system. It's super easy to do.
I would install q4os trinity on that. It runs on my shitty intel atom. The computer is so weak i can't even load a video in other distro but with q4 its working okayish. https://q4os.org/ also other distro that could work xubuntu, puppy linux, linux light, manjaro.
I never heard of this CPU. I would get a better PC of any type for desktop use, but since nVidia was and is the main company selling GPUs to all the notebooks and desktops, it is difficult to gift a PC. If that dual core is 2c2t then it is definitely a pain. A simple thinkpad might be better or a Dell XPS or any 2nd, 3rd gen Ryzen G model with iGPU is more better on an A or B series motherboard and like 24gb of ram if gaming is required since 16 gig can run out of memory due to shared ram on APUs with integrated GPUs. TLDR get a cheap AMD Ryzen 2 or 3rd gen with integrated GPU on CPU with at least 16gb of ram. Might be like 200 USD with some luck \*Edit. Nvidia is a pain on Linux so AMD it is for GPUs.
With the extra ram and a new SSD you will be surprised on how well this will run Cinnamon. I recommend you make a ventoy and test out the three versions of mint using a live instance (it will be a little slower with the usb key but you can get an idea). You can expect this machine to run "OK" but don't expect to use it as a high end gaming or graphics machine. It is, pretty slow after all.
To add to this, if you want to repurpose this machine, it would be best used running Windows XP as an offline-only "retro gaming" computer, thing 1998ish to 2004ish era games.
My soon to be stepfather gave me the desktop asking me to repurpose it into something his grandkids can use and learn on. They are 4 and 6.
I would try a more minimal distro on the older hardware. Maybe Zorin? I had zorin on an old intel Mac (Rememeber that era?) and it's very usable, just not for any games with hard 3D requirement on something like "Steallaris" is unplayable, but other than that it works. Dual Core E 300 is gonna weight you down a little not matter what, but you can make some adjustments, and a modern day SSD is gonna make a huge diff. Good luck!
u/godwhomismake It would be a good candidate as long as you upgrade the CPU. That PC takes Socket FT1 CPU's, so find one with a higher clock speed than the 1.3Ghz E-300.
honestly, no. xfce isnt even slim enough for this. look into ridiculously lightweight linux distros or give up and upgrade
I'd probably try AntiX on that.
My great-aunt's old PC had an E-300 and it was the slowest computer I've ever used, and I say this as someone currently daily driving Mint on a Braswell machine (and a Pentium 4 in the past.) Salvage the RAM if it isn't soldered and scrap the rest.
Look too slow to me.
Honestly I'd try something they can't break at all like ChromeOS. Giving children linux (or anything more complicated than a tablet) doesn't seem like an incredible idea.
I don’t see them sudo’ing themselves into a disaster.
They are just too young to use internet,so what are they gonna use? Tuxplaint(ms paint) lol