Best OS For Netbooks and Underpowered Tablets?

vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by managing to give me a better battery life. I've been happy using XP Tablet on this machine until recently, when I started thinking that by optimizing the OS for targeted use, I may be able to squeeze more out of the device. So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop? Usage is typically light — web surfing (with multimedia), email, word processing, spreadsheet and reading PDFs. Also, what OS would you recommend for a ultraportable tablet? Usage is similar to a netbook; there's a little more document editing going on, and good handwriting recognition and note-taking software would be great." Read on for further details about vigmeister's question. vigmeister continues, "I would like for the user experience to be snappy on a computer that is essentially running the equivalent of a 1.2 GHz PIII with 512mb RAM. The other objective for both of these is to maximize the battery life, as that is the major drawback of these ultraportables. A small memory footprint would work wonders, since the hard drives on these devices are typically slow and completely suck the joy out of using them when swap space is being used. Any tips? If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."

Comments

Re:options

[Svartalf]

The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.

And as a developer, I will state that I've had the opposite experience with Ubuntu on my HP Pavilion dv9000 (Never booted with Vista while in my possession...) and, the previous Pavilion dv6000, the Compaq Evo n800, and my eeePC.

Keep in mind the eeePC with Xandros runs better and actually has a slightly better life than the XP install on the same class of machine. If your claim is correct, why is this the case?

Re:Are you kidding?

[RiotingPacifist]

linux is not great though, even after taking the suggestions from powertop (i believe they are implemented in "laptop-mode" for ubuntu but dont sue me if im wrong), it marginally outperforms windows machines, but still lakes acpi support to make suspend useable (depends on machine ofc). Using a touchpad in xorg also seams to kill battery life.

However what is great is the amount of user interaction with the powersaving, if you use something like kpowersave you just scroll over the icon to change your brightness (which cuts power consumption to nearly half on my laptop), there is also compression on hibernate, which means that you can get back to full desktop much faster than a normal hibernate/boot. In adition using powertop lets you audit your system to see whats wasting your batteries when idle (kicker in KDE is a common suspect, so switching to fluxbox can also give a marginal (5-10 mins) battery life increase)

My point: Linux is no better (and often worse) by default, but if you tweak it you CAN outperfom windows and gain other benifits too (no need for AV, faster boot, faster hibernate, faster file access and chkdsk (reiserfs mainly but ext3 is good too))