Linux vs windows for watching movies, listening to music?

Question

Windows

Linuxoid comrades and others like them, advice is required.
the essence is this - the client brought a netbook. atom at 1.6GHz and 2g of RAM. with a terribly braking seven. it is clear that for her iron is weak. the client, except for watching movies / listening to music / the Internet, no longer uses it in any way.
so the question is - to put Windows back there, maybe the top ten, or some kind of Linux distribution? Ubuntu will be hard for him, I think.
help, I know your grandparents are sitting on Linux)
thanks)

Answer 1

There is a suspicion that the issue is not so much in the system, but in the culture of using a computer and in software algorithms.
I have a Samsung N140 netbook from 2009; For the past year and a half, I have hardly turned it on. It has WinXP 32-bit, Atom N280 processor (1.66 GHz), 1 GB of memory, integrated video. The resident software is kept to an absolute minimum, the disk is defragmented and cleaned regularly (so that there is always at least 20 GB of free space). MPC-HC with manual selection of drivers is used for playback.
1080p24 and 720p30 video compressed with H.264, XviD, VC-1 codecs is decoded at full speed; the audio track format has almost no effect (but see the note at the end of the post). For H.264 decoding, DiAVC is installed (it used to be CoreAVC, it is somewhat slower). The rest is decoded by the free FFmpeg/libavcodec package (the same as that built into the VLC player). In terms of decoding speed, specifically H.264 / AVC, the layout of forces is as follows: DiAVC > CoreAVC > FFmpeg.
Flash and H.265 (720p30 and higher) were definitely slowing down a year and a half ago, so you couldn’t watch YouTube in high resolution without brakes (but you could download the video and open it with MPC-HC - then it went at full speed).
VP9 (HTML5 video) has not yet tried, but 720p30, in theory, should stretch.
Audio in WV, APE, FLAC, TAK, AAC, Vorbis, MP3, etc. formats and 24-bit output is decoded at full speed; foobar2000 is used for listening.
An important note: if a netbook has a HDD, and even a low one (less than 160 GB), then fragmentation will kill performance on files with a high bitrate, regardless of the system and installed decoders. This is true for files with a total bitrate of about 1.5 Mbps and above. On files with a total bitrate of about 9-10 Mbps and higher, small disks usually start to choke and skip frames anyway, so it's better to forget about them.
EDIT: As for the Internet, the average site in any modern browser with a good ad blocker opens without problems, but sites overloaded with flash or javascript (Google Docs, Gmail) are godlessly slow. The OS and software here, unfortunately, will not change anything - this processor can not cope. 2 GB for everyday tasks is quite enough (to watch a movie for sure), but the paging file must be set to a fixed size (4 GB should be enough), make sure that it is not fragmented, and, if possible, move it to the beginning of the disk. This can be done with a good defragmenter with a data optimization function, or manually: 1) delete everything from the disk except the system and the basic set of software (you can temporarily rewrite it to an external disk); 2) turn off the paging file and reboot; 3) defragment the disk; 4) turn on the paging file again - it will be created in the unoccupied area closest to the beginning of the disk. Then you can write the user files back.

Answer 2

NehalemEX : check if the CPU supports 4 gigabytes if you decide to add memory.
On netbooks, there were processors such as Intel® Atom™ Processor N450 (512K Cache, 1.66 GHz), which support 2 gigas maximum.
From Linux, I can recommend Elementary OS, nice, pretty fast, Midori's built-in browser is faster than Chrome, etc., or Debian with XFCE, it's even faster, but it takes one evening to tweak.
In both cases, put SMplayer under the video, on ASUS EEE701 it almost pulls HD 720p, I think it will work for you, lower resolutions without the slightest problem.
And in fact, you can install any distro, but it's easier to choose the environment.

Answer 3

The problem is not the OS, but the amount of memory.
Modern browsers eat a lot of RAM, and 2GB of brakes will be in any case.
Yes, and the disk there is likely to be very slow.
Add RAM, and change disks, or put up with brakes.
Replacing the OS won't help.

Answer 4

I don’t know how on Linux on Windows XP the video will work only in uncompressed high quality and the sound will slow down in modern players. But Windows itself will work fine with such characteristics.

Answer 5

Look here . You set a bunch of parameters and get what you are looking for.

Answer 6

You can try Windows Embedded. I recently read that it's not a bad idea. There are some problems with non-standard equipment, but in general you can use it.

Answer 7

I would put him XP Game Edition .... It started on my Pentium I or even 486 (already forgot a little), although the minimum percentage of PII is written - 233 MHz

Answer 8

Try xubuntu, it's ubuntu with xfce GUI. I myself have a samsung n100 netbook. Characteristics like yours, it works perfectly, but you can’t watch a movie on it, only surfing, a netbook.