Win10 install - how low can you go? Attempt 1 - Samsung netbook, Atom processor

[Analoguesat]

Info

This is an old Samsung NP-150Plus netbook with a 2011 sticker on it.


Computer specs

Samsung NP-150 Plus netbook
1GB ram (!)
80GB platter hdd that was lying around
Atom processor running at 1.5GHz


Total cost

Laptop - nil - donated years ago


Verdict

Installing the LTSC version was lethargic, but it went on eventually.

Performance - well to put it bluntly the performance is dreadful. Dont bother even trying if this is the spec of the computer you are looking at - find a linux distribution & put that on instead. Or stick with win7 home and accept the risks..

Firefox browser is too much of a system hog to be usable, the low overhead Torch browser was marginally better but not much. Youtube videos would run fairly smoothly at 360p which sounds pretty bad but the screen res is only 1024*600 so not much of a loss.

Looking at task manager, doing almost anything maxes out the cpu, ram or disk drive, or occasionally all three. If I can find a spare ssd lying around I may rety this one but I doubt its going to make that much difference seeing as the pi55 poor Atom processor is maxing out much of the time.

 

[4wd]

^^^ lol, great test. Had a 1 GB samsung netbook battle going on years ago, w7 ...only real practical use was as a big, lumpy mp3 player :O) although some webbrowsing was sometimes quite tolerable (not firefox, IE used a little less resources and worked somehow). XP, like originally designed for, would have been quite ok.

As experienced, 1GB, hd, celeron, atom + modern OS = constantly swap like crazy to hd, very interesting test to see with ssd instead of hd, would still swap a lot during boot and opening of programs, but maybe 10+ times faster, could make all the difference from nearly useless to tolerable for certain applications.

My contribution to the lowest of pckind, currently running w10 enterprise (ltsc) on a far from modern 2014 Dell Latitude, i5, 8GB, 256GB msata (boot, os) + 1 TB hd. It flies for all kinds of daily use. Boot to desktop: 12 sec, 1.1 GB mem in use. No problems getting all needed drivers, everything works. But without the ssd much would have turned into melasse.

 

[jeallen01]

@Analoguesat

I "inherited" an earlier Samsung NP110 about 2 yrs ago (gave stepdaughter a 1/2 decent Dell laptop - but even then it later needed an SSD & replacement 8GB RAM before it ran W10 Pro "smoothly"!).

OTOH, the 2012-13 vintage Vivobook S200E with an SSD runs W10 Pro pretty well - even over the wifi - because it came with 4GB soldered onto the m/b (so can't be upgraded).

Also got a couple of 2007-vintage Dell 1525's and they run W10 (one Home, one Pro) well (including Office 2016 & 2019 respectively) with SSD's (dead easy to install those m/c's) and 4GB - just don't try anything "really complicated" with them!

As for that NP110, I "rediscovered" it yesterday - and I remember fitting a 2GB RAM stick in it just after I got it and that made it run somewhat more smoothly. Also installed the then-current MINT distro to experiment with LINUX, but that soon got sidetracked by other things - must have another try when less busy!

 

[jeallen01]

PS:
Adding a USB memory stick and activating it in "ReadyBoost" mode can help some machines if that stick is "fast enough" , i.e. usually means a USB3, and not USB2, one (but probably won't work on a fairly modern m/c because even a USB3 stick may not be "fast enough"). That can add the same amount (but no more) of RAM as is already installed in the m/c, and thus effectively double the available RAM, and it certainly helped a bit with SWMBO's Dell 1525.

 

[steeviebops]

I definitely wouldn't advise running any version of Windows 10 on 1GB of RAM but if you had to, sticking with 32-bit would be a good idea. 64-bit uses roughly 30% more memory.

LTSC is great. I was lucky that I worked for an company with internal use rights and I got a copy that way. The thing I like the most about it is no need to upgrade every 6 months. And there's nothing in the post-1809 builds that I really want so staying on 1809 is fine for now.

 

[Analoguesat]

I definitely wouldn't advise running any version of Windows 10 on 1GB of RAM but if you had to, sticking with 32-bit would be a good idea. 64-bit uses roughly 30% more memory.

LTSC is great. I was lucky that I worked for an company with internal use rights and I got a copy that way. The thing I like the most about it is no need to upgrade every 6 months. And there's nothing in the post-1809 builds that I really want so staying on 1809 is fine for now.

Lol - it was just an experiment to see just how horrible the experience would be. I was using the 32bit version of ltsc on it.

Plenty more low spec junk available in the spares boxes at work so I will be borrowing some of it over the next few weeks to see just "how low can we go"

 

[Topper]

Lol - it was just an experiment to see just how horrible the experience would be. I was using the 32bit version of ltsc on it.

Plenty more low spec junk available in the spares boxes at work so I will be borrowing some of it over the next few weeks to see just "how low can we go"

Have to say I am puzzled as to how you are doing that as my wife has an old HP notebook with Windows 8.1 on it however it will not upgrade to W10 as it says it does not meet the minimum requirements of 4GB ram as it only has 2GB and is not upgradeable.

 

[4wd]

Windows 8.1 on it however it will not upgrade to W10

Get a little more ram? Won't cost much. Or maybe it's soldered-on ram and no slots, then one is stuck.

But I'd not upgrade anyway, get w10 from microsoft download site and do a fresh, clean install. After install it will activate with no problem. Will be useable with 2GB (...and a ssd). Then add classic shell + o&o shutup. But don't expect to use Photoshop + stream video + have 20 tabs open in a browser lol :O)

Upgrade or clean install, 1st backup all important files from the 8.1 setup.

But? unless some special w10 features (bloatware :O) are highly sought after, and the laptop is behaving ok, why not simply stay on 8.1 (or refresh 8.1), it's a great os, w7 mk2, still got years of update\security, just needs classic shell to get rid of the metro\fisherprice interface fiasco.

 

[jeallen01]

Have to say I am puzzled as to how you are doing that as my wife has an old HP notebook with Windows 8.1 on it however it will not upgrade to W10 as it says it does not meet the minimum requirements of 4GB ram as it only has 2GB and is not upgradeable.

@Topper
Take another look at what I said in post#4 about using Readyboost on a USB stick - hopefully that would get you another 2GB

 

[Analoguesat]

Get a little more ram? Won't cost much. Or maybe it's soldered-on ram and no slots, then one is stuck.

But I'd not upgrade anyway, get w10 from microsoft download site and do a fresh, clean install. After install it will activate with no problem. Will be useable with 2GB (...and a ssd). Then add classic shell + o&o shutup. But don't expect to use Photoshop + stream video + have 20 tabs open in a browser lol :O)

Upgrade or clean install, 1st backup all important files from the 8.1 setup.

But? unless some special w10 features (bloatware :O) are highly sought after, and the laptop is behaving ok, why not simply stay on 8.1 (or refresh 8.1), it's a great os, w7 mk2, still got years of update\security, just needs classic shell to get rid of the metro\fisherprice interface fiasco.

The official MS minimum specs is 1GB ram for a 32 bit install.

Windows 10 system requirements - Microsoft Support

Windows 10 system requirements

support.microsoft.com

Ive always had my doubts at MS's minimum specs. many years ago I put win95 onto a desktop with the minimum spec 4mb ram (yup mb not gb for you youngsters!). It would load. Just about. Forget doing ANYTHING with it though..... The performance was appalling

Theoretically that crappy old amsung netbook is within the minimum specs. Ive got a very similar Dell one with a marginally faster processor and an ssd happily running win7 home on it. Its travelled all round Europe with me over the years. The original hdd died and I put the ssd into it upgrading it from win7 starter to win7 home at the same time. Those of you taking my aircraft data - the Dell is the one the tracking software runs on. As long as its rebooted every 3 or 4 weeks it runs happily no issues at all.

 

[Topper]

The official MS minimum specs is 1GB ram for a 32 bit install.

64 bit unit

@Topper
Take another look at what I said in post#4 about using Readyboost on a USB stick - hopefully that would get you another 2GB

Will do

 

[Analoguesat]

64 bit unit

2gig minimum for x64.

 

[jeallen01]

2gig minimum for x64.

Just before the first lockdown, I was at a U3A mtg where the presenter was using her new W10 Home laptop with 2GB - now she's using a Macbook !

 

[steeviebops]

The official MS minimum specs is 1GB ram for a 32 bit install.

Windows 10 system requirements - Microsoft Support

Windows 10 system requirements

support.microsoft.com

Ive always had my doubts at MS's minimum specs. many years ago I put win95 onto a desktop with the minimum spec 4mb ram (yup mb not gb for you youngsters!). It would load. Just about. Forget doing ANYTHING with it though..... The performance was appalling

Theoretically that crappy old amsung netbook is within the minimum specs. Ive got a very similar Dell one with a marginally faster processor and an ssd happily running win7 home on it. Its travelled all round Europe with me over the years. The original hdd died and I put the ssd into it upgrading it from win7 starter to win7 home at the same time. Those of you taking my aircraft data - the Dell is the one the tracking software runs on. As long as its rebooted every 3 or 4 weeks it runs happily no issues at all.

I installed Windows 95 as a test on a 386SX laptop with 6MB of RAM. Only for the fact I was using a modern hard drive, it would have been unusable. I still have the machine and I also have an adapter to convert an M.2 SSD to 2.5" IDE... SSD in a 386 anyone?

 

[Topper]

Just before the first lockdown, I was at a U3A mtg where the presenter was using her new W10 Home laptop with 2GB - now she's using a Macbook !

No doubt it was a very long meeting

 

[jeallen01]

No doubt it was a very long meeting

To be "fair", that low-spec laptop didn't appear to slow the presentation (no videos ISTR) but she does a lot of other stuff which is probably much more intensive - and she already had a iPhone - so that's probably why she got the Macbook.

As for the length of the mtg, I don't know as I left early as I had other things to attend to

 

[Topper]

To be fair I am still attempting to find a solution to the message "This device cannot be used for ReadyBoost - The device does not have the required performance characteristics for use in speeding up your system" that is displayed on both my laptop and my wife's which is the one I am attempting to upgrade from 64bit 2Gb Win 8.1 to Win 10 via doubling the 2Gb RAM to 4Gb using ready boost (thus allowing the upgrade) using a USB 3 flash drive 128Gb yet both our laptops exhibit the same message, at the end of the day it is not critical but a nice to have. I seem to remember Ramdisk and Ramboost from my Dos and early Windows days, which MS bought out to include in their software, lord only knows why it has become so impossible to implement

 

[jeallen01]

@Topper

I have similar issues with the later m/c's and I believe that it is because their internal data buses for the installed RAM are faster than the buses that serve the USB ports - and that the problem is more likely to happen with "more modern" m/c's that have USB3 ports because their internal buses do run faster than much older ones with only USB2 ports.

BTW: for many years (i.e. since 2013 when I bought my "main" laptop), I only ever bought m/c's with at least 4GB RAM and at least 3 USB ports, of which at least one had to be UBS3 - unfortunately, many people have since bought "shiney" new m/c's with only 2GB, and sometimes not even USB3 ports, because they were not aware of the "built-in obsolescence" that came with those.

 

[Topper]

@Topper

BTW: for many years (i.e. since 2013 when I bought my "main" laptop), I only ever bought m/c's with at least 4GB RAM and at least 3 USB ports, of which at least one had to be UBS3 - unfortunately, many people have since bought "shiney" new m/c's with only 2GB, and sometimes not even USB3 ports, because they were not aware of the "built-in obsolescence" that came with those.

Well my laptop is seven years old but was a Sony refurbished Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4200U CPU @ 1.60GHz 1.60 GHz with 8Gb ram and now SSD, still very usable on Win 10 20H2
My wife's one is an HP notebook that was being thrown out a couple of months ago (she has always borrowed mine until this) by some friends having replaced it with a modern acer unit so i said I would take it rather than it be thrown out. Am just frustrated I am unable to upgrade hers to Win 10, I rarely buy anything new

 

[Analoguesat]

@Topper have you tried a clean install rather than an o/s upgrade?