I have an old Acer Aspire One ZG5 with just 1 GB DDR2 RAM here. First I tried to use LXDE on it because to my knowledge it is the lightest arguably complete desktop that doesn't need to be individually configured to run as expected and that can handle windows on a tiny 1024x600 pixel screen well. But I can't get ConnMan to work reliably when the device needs to work with different WLAN connections in various places.
Therefore, I tried GNOME because I recently was surprised how performant it was with even only 4 GB of RAM. But 1 GB clearly isn't enough for GNOME to not get annoyed by waiting for the interface to react and it sometimes drew too large windows I couldn't even scale down or move enough around to actually see or reach all buttons.
Afterwards I tried LxQt instead because I figured that things should have progressed there compared to LXDE since it has seen further development in recent years. But to my surprise it also uses ConnMan and I do have the same problems using it.
From my investigations a few years back I remembered that Xfce wasn't considered a lot lighter than KDE and GNOME. But at least somewhat lighter. To my surprise I must admit that it works rather well on this little device. And I don't have to deal with ConnMan either.
I still want to replace the hard disc for an SSD and if I can find the proper 1 GB DDR2 RAM module I can at least go up to 1,5 GB RAM. (My test with a 2 GB module was unfortunately unsuccessful. I should have expected that but in my experience most laptops can handle more RAM than they officially support. Unfortunately, this isn't one of those devices. – At least with the current bios. I wanted to see if I can find a newer version but the Asus support page requires me to give a SNID oder serial numer, which I do have (I even checked in the bios if it is correct), but the Asus page still doesn't accept it and therefore doesn't even show me if there is a newer bios version.
Even the ADATA SX900 512 GB SSD I bought "used" (in the still sealed packaging) to speed the device up, doesn't get recognized. This however doesn't seem to be a problem of the netbook. It also wasn't recognized in two other laptops I tested it in. I searched around online and found out that this specific SSD has kind of an unusual storage handling that sacrifices reliability for capacity. Maybe this is the reason it doesn't work ...
With an SSD the netbook should at least load things much faster even if it is still limited by the small amount of RAM. Hopefully, I can still improve the netbook performance by getting a workable SSD and maybe even Acer replies to my request about the inaccessible bios upgrade, that might enable it to make use of a bigger RAM module.
Therefore, I tried GNOME because I recently was surprised how performant it was with even only 4 GB of RAM. But 1 GB clearly isn't enough for GNOME to not get annoyed by waiting for the interface to react and it sometimes drew too large windows I couldn't even scale down or move enough around to actually see or reach all buttons.
Afterwards I tried LxQt instead because I figured that things should have progressed there compared to LXDE since it has seen further development in recent years. But to my surprise it also uses ConnMan and I do have the same problems using it.
From my investigations a few years back I remembered that Xfce wasn't considered a lot lighter than KDE and GNOME. But at least somewhat lighter. To my surprise I must admit that it works rather well on this little device. And I don't have to deal with ConnMan either.
I still want to replace the hard disc for an SSD and if I can find the proper 1 GB DDR2 RAM module I can at least go up to 1,5 GB RAM. (My test with a 2 GB module was unfortunately unsuccessful. I should have expected that but in my experience most laptops can handle more RAM than they officially support. Unfortunately, this isn't one of those devices. – At least with the current bios. I wanted to see if I can find a newer version but the Asus support page requires me to give a SNID oder serial numer, which I do have (I even checked in the bios if it is correct), but the Asus page still doesn't accept it and therefore doesn't even show me if there is a newer bios version.
Even the ADATA SX900 512 GB SSD I bought "used" (in the still sealed packaging) to speed the device up, doesn't get recognized. This however doesn't seem to be a problem of the netbook. It also wasn't recognized in two other laptops I tested it in. I searched around online and found out that this specific SSD has kind of an unusual storage handling that sacrifices reliability for capacity. Maybe this is the reason it doesn't work ...
With an SSD the netbook should at least load things much faster even if it is still limited by the small amount of RAM. Hopefully, I can still improve the netbook performance by getting a workable SSD and maybe even Acer replies to my request about the inaccessible bios upgrade, that might enable it to make use of a bigger RAM module.
Statistics: Posted by Onsemeliot — 2024-08-25 19:40
