Puppy Linux + HP Pavilion N5450 = Much Better

I have an old “Windows XP Ready!” (remember those stickers?) HP Pavilion N5450 laptop; Pentium III 800 MHz, 256 MB RAM that has been slowly, slowly running Windows XP for several years now. We now use it for the occasional news or recipe lookup in our kitchen. I would often have the passing thought to “add more RAM” as I would randomly wait for the system to catch up with the long-spinning hard drive’s attempt to read and write to virtual memory. Of course, adding RAM to an old machine is a big bother, and, is it worth the cost and trouble? I had tried loading ubuntu on the laptop but the CD installer drops into an endless loop before the video driver loads.

The system chugged along well enough, until XP SP3 came out. I spent 3 non-contiguous day’s worth of troubleshooting and ultimately getting SP3 to install (one of the hang-ups was that Windows Genuine Advantage wouldn’t load, which was my fault, as I disabled as many services as I could to pep up performance) After the install, the system now crawled to a halt. Loading Chrome would bring the laptop to its knees — the VM process taking on up to 10 minutes, really. At this point I was ready to chuck the laptop.

I had heard over at the lottalinux podcast an incidental mention of installing puppy linux on an old laptop. A little quick research suggested it might make the machine usable again. So, with nothing to lose but time, I grabbed the latest ISO image of the bootable CD for Puppy Linux 4.1 (a 94 MB download; what’s not to love about that?) and burned the disk. I started the laptop with the disk and I had the new system up and running of the disk. As Chef Tell used to say; “Very simple, very easy.”

A little advice: when the Puppy installer says to override the grubconfig’s default for loading grub to the linux partition and to do so to the MBR, do what it says; choose “MBR.” Also, for grub, use the standard non-graphical loader for an old machine. Otherwise, the system chokes at startup, for whatever reason.

Now to get vncserver working on it…