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Lowend chromebook performance
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Lowend chromebook performance

edited December 2014 in General

Has anyone had any success with running chromeOS on extremely low powered devices/netbooks?

Mainly one with the specs of a Samsung NP-N130. How the person who used it for 2 years is beyond me since Windows 7 on there is crazy slow and things take ages to open.

Ive managed to get it to start up on there, but have not installed it due to the lack of a compatible WiFi card and the fact that someone seems to have broken some of the pins on the Ethernet jack. Bit hesitant to get a wifi card that works since I don't know how it really performs.

Comments

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I had a Samsung Chromebook 3 which had a dual core 1.7Ghz Exynos processor and 2GB of RAM. I found it was OK as long as I didn't open too many tabs. It had an SSD drive. Not a speed demon but fast enough for browse, read, browse, read, etc.

    The laptop you listed is a 1.6Ghz Atom N270, which is single core. It also only has 1GB of RAM and I'm assuming SATA drive. I'd expect it to be slower. Adding RAM and SSD would make it faster but...it depends how much you want to sink into it. I am always leery of single-core setups.

    However, as a point of comparison...

    I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop which has a AMD Sempron 3500+ CPU. That's a 1.8Ghz single-core. I modified it a bit - bumped the memory to 4GB DDR2 and put in an SSD drive. I'm running OpenBSD 5.6 on it with xfce4 and using Firefox and it works fine - no complaints on speed.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    raindog308 said: 1.6Ghz Atom N270

    That is what my EEPCs have. I installed everything I use on them, have 4 GB SSD on each and one has another 16 GB but way slower. Class 10 SD cards are way faster.
    One has 2 GB, the rest have 1. Runs windows 7 and xp both stripped down (updated in some 1.8-2GB disk space) with no swap file pretty ok, allowing me to run 3 different browsers with some tabs each. It is not faster than the quad core phone at browsing, but is faster in RDP, too bad for the low res. WCDMA also helps for one, but i can always tether on the phone. Battery lasts 4 hours on one and under 2 the rest. When I go in the mountains I get 2 batteries, you may never know.
    Havent tried chrome OS, but debian runs very well, I have it installed on the second 16 GB disk on one and works very fast once it booted and the browsers are started. When using the fast 4 GB disk it works faster than xp and even 7.

  • said: since Windows 7 on there is crazy slow and things take ages to open.

    Can you hear a lot of hard drive activity or is it the lack of CPU power? Ubuntu performs much better than Windows 7 on my slow 5.4k rpm HDD. But it seems to use more CPU...

  • Since Debian happens to support my wifi card (and ChromeOS doesn't), I will see if I can get something minimal up, like LXDE or OpenBox with wpa_supplicant

  • get the intel versions forget the others like the samsung Chromebooks. i had one installed ubuntu but to save resources i used fluxbox. This was not the process installing to flash memory but on the ssd drive instead. i had it working and supported x86_64 deb package's. I was also able to recompile the kernel and worked great. too bad memory is 4gb max. I sold it but plan to buy another one. Battery life is insane

  • Go with Linux, Debian with xfce or xubuntu are both great choices.

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