I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.
Hopefully it got standard SATA connector.
You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.
Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.
Yeah, it’s not quick, there is no noticeable difference in speed. Random read should be much quicker. But you can’t really buy ide hdds anymore and they will die sooner or later, and the price of small m.2 sata ssds are falling.
without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point
Yeah the machine is 32-bit, so it’s a question worth asking.