Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[jsorcha]

Good evening. I have an old Compaq Presario from the early 2000's, a Pentium processor, and maybe 512 RAM. Will I be able to use Puppy on it? Is there an older version of Puppy that might work better? Thanks.

[matchpoint]

Hey Jsorcha mate. Is this a Pentium 3 or 4?

The newer ones, no. The furthest I'd go back is with Precise-5.7.1-retro here.

[bigpup]

A lot of Puppy versions will probably work OK.
The very newest Puppies are more about supporting the newest hardware, but they do still work on a lot of old hardware.

This info would help to give you some specific Puppies to try.

[Mike Walsh]

Hi, jsorcha.

I ran Tahrpup 6.0.5 on a 2002 Dell Inspiron lappie for quite some time. With a Pentium 4, and a gig of RAM, it was.....steady (not blazing fast), but it ran OOTB, and was very reliable.

As others have said, the model of Pentium will make a big difference to what can be recommended. The Pentium 4's came with the SSE2 instruction set, which is considered the bare minimum requirement for running a web browser nowadays.....although there are even workarounds for that. And a web browser is the one thing most folks do want, if they don't run anything else.

Generally speaking, a P4 and a minimum of 512 MB RAM ought to give you a halfway reasonable experience with Pup. If you could let us know the specs in a bit more detail, please; CPU, amount of RAM, size of HDD (if there is one!), type of graphics chip/card.....that kinda thing. Failing that, the exact make and model number would help.


Mike

[Fossil]

jsorcha,
To confirm: I'm writing this while running Puppy Tahrpup 6.0.5, on an old Compaq Presario V5000, AMD Sempron 3300+, Socket U23, with 512 megs RAM and the same amount of swap.
The computer was a 'gift' as it was considered inoperable due to some fool ripping out the USB connectors. Don't ask why; I don't know.
As for Mike Walsh's old Dell, it's going down in computer history as, 'The one that could'!

[keniv]

I run an old Toshiba laptop 800MHz P3 320MB (this is the max ram that can be installed). I have used a number of pups on it but my favourite is lucid 5287. This has been updated a number of times. I prefer the 2016 version. It can also use a modern browser in the form of palemoon. It is a little slow but is also updatable. I also use racy 5.5. There is also an update for this. I've applied this update. Both of these os make this machine very usable.

Regards,

Ken.

[Mike Walsh]

[Fossil]

Most welcome! Most welcome, old boy! Chin-chin!

[Mike Walsh]

[tallboy]

Oh my, oh my, see what happens when 2 limeys meet in a forum...
keniv, stay north of that border, or else you see what may happen to you!

[Mike Walsh]

[Fossil]

[tallboy]

[keniv]

Hello All,
Thanks for the invite. I do have relations south of the border and my father came from Hampshire. Fossil's not the only one with a headless machine still running. I've got two of these Toshibas. The display stopped working on one so I removed it and now I have a topless laptop. I use it in my shed. I have an old lcd tv bought for £5 as a nonworker. It has scart, composite video and vga inputs. I use vga with the Toshiba on which I keep vintage radio and tv data as vintage electronics is a bit of a hobby for me. I also run wine on it as I have a couple of windows programs that I run as well. I have a digital tv box connected to scart and a cheap Chinese android box running Kodi and some software defined radio programs. The android box is the best spect machine I've got. The old machine in the shed is still doing good work. I have wifi out there as well. Should have said in my last that I also run precise 5.7.1.

Regards,

Ken.

[SmartDuck]

Running Slacko 6.3.2 on an old Dell Latitude D505 from 2004 with 512MB ram watching youtube movies, so you will be fine running one of the Puppies.