I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
Compile your own kernel for those atom processors and they work much better.
It’s not hard, there’s a text interface for it where you just pick what to do from a list.
That will only speed it up slightly at best and at worse it will be slower
I’ve never compiled my kernel so I’m not familiar with what is happening there, but why could that be faster? Is it only installing drivers for present devices, or what is happening?
I can’t remember off the top of my head because it’s been a long while, but there’s some weird option inside the configurator that accounts for one of the things the early atom line doesn’t have that the default kernel expects out of x86 or x64 processors.
Of course, any binary program that was compiled with the expectation of that capacity would also have weird hangs and slowness, but (like I said, a while ago) that didn’t tend to cause a 1.3ghz atom to be slower than a 700mhz pentium m.