Old laptop, which is the better system for it, xp or win7?

holopainen · Oct 19, 2013

I have to fix my sister's laptop. I want a clean reinstall and I was wondering which system is the better choice , xp or win7?

It's an Acer Aspire 3623WXMi.
CPU: Intel Celeron M 370 / 1.5 GHz
RAM: 1.5 gb
hdd : 80 gb
graphics: Intel GMA 900

Thanks in advance.

Ger Dumont · Oct 19, 2013

holopainen :

You may want to consider Linux.
Windows 7 is too heavy, win xp is too old
I have a laptop with a pentium M 1.4 and 512 Mb which runs great on Sparkylinux, (have to use a non PAE kernel).

holopainen · Oct 19, 2013

The problem with Linux is that my sister even has difficulties using windows, so I'd go for an windows interface.

pauls3743 · Oct 19, 2013

I have a similar laptop that I tried Win7 on. The Acer Aspire 3614 WMLi. Apart from being a bit heavier I also found it didn't support the aero interface because the graphics card couldn't support it. I would suggest either one of the linux distros. The other option, although I haven't tried it myself, would be to give Win 8.1 a go.

holopainen · Oct 19, 2013

It has windows 7 on it, and I see that it couldn't install the video drivers properly. GMA 900 is not in the device manager. Standard video adapter is install. Is this a big issue? Is this a big performance hit? The computer is struggling even with small resolution youtube videos.

jaguarskx · Oct 19, 2013

It's no surprise it is struggling with youtube videos.

First the laptop is very old. The CPU was released back in 2004 and it is only a single core CPU. The GMA 900 is Intel's 1st generation graphics core that uses DirectX 9 and again it was released back in 2004. The reason why it is struggling with youtube (and any other site using Adobe Flash or similar types of videos) is because Flash requires some decent horse power to decode the video so that it can be played back. The GMA 900 lacks any hardware capabilities to decode Flash. That means the CPU is doing all the video decoding. Given the fact that you have an obsolete CPU by today's standards, the CPU is struggling to decode and playback videos. I'm pretty sure if you open Task Manager you will see the CPU operating at 100%.

In short, you need a new laptop even if your sister just wants to do something as "simple" as surfing the net.

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Old laptop, which is the better system for it, xp or win7?

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