I have an old Acer Aspire 4920 bought in 2008 or so with 1GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I had windows 7 on it. I erased it for obvious reasons and installed Ubuntu 16.04, but later felt its slow and 16.04 recommends 2GB RAM. So I erased it and installed 14.04 64bit which recommends minimum 512MB. I thought it will be fast because my RAM is double the minimum requirement. Unfortunately, it is slow as well. Does anyone know why? Is the RAM too low or should I try 32bit version? Please help.
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Slow in what way? Laggy performance or apps taking a while to open? – TheWanderer Jul 28 '16 at 22:15
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3I'm surprised you would be running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu on a old machine as you have. The Ram is clearly to low and should be upgraded or you should down size to a lighter version of Ubuntu as recommended. Having 1-GB of Ram is just not enough Ubuntu's new releases are craving more Ram theses day and should always be a concern – Rob Goss Jul 29 '16 at 01:41
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3Possible duplicate of How do I find out which version and derivative of Ubuntu is right for my hardware in terms of minimal system requirements? and possible duplicate of What are the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit, and which should I choose? – karel Jul 29 '16 at 10:38
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I disagreed with the close votes. This is not about a comparison or minimum requirement, this is asking an exact answer for a clearly outlined spec. – Anwar Jul 31 '16 at 04:58
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Contrary to Alcuin's answer the architecture has been an issue in the past. It was also discussed in What are the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit, and which should I choose?
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Basically, it's like giving up 30% of your RAM in exchange of possible gain of 10% CPU speed.
If you don't have plenty of RAM to waste, then 32-bit might be a better choice, there are 2 problems though:
- The 32-bit architecture will be phased out in the next years.
- Browsers like Firefox and Chrome have dropped support for 32-bit (at least they don't provide 32-bit Windows installers anymore) and more packages may follow.
I strongly recommend to upgrade the RAM if you want to use such a computer today and a few years more. In your case you probably need DDR2 SO DIMMs which are still sold on Ebay (for a comparably high price considering the amount of RAM you get). 2GB is the absolute minimum, 3 or 4GB are better, if the computer supports it. An SSD might help when swapping happens and minimize the problem that you don't have a lot of RAM for caching.
Basically I consider such a computer to be unusable without upgrading the RAM. On the other side a family member has a low powered AMD laptop with 4GB RAM, an SSD for Ubuntu and Windows 10 on HDD from 2009 which still works.
LiveWireBT
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32-bit vs 64-bit isn't the issue. In my experience, regular Ubuntu w/ Unity just doesn't run well on anything less than 2GB of ram (even that is too little). Right now I'm using 14.04 with firefox, totem, and rhythmbox open, and according to System Monitor it's using 1.5GB. If all you have is 1GB to work with, I'd strongly suggest a lighter flavor like Lubuntu or Ubuntu MATE, especially with your older hardware.
Alcuin Arundel
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