Which OS To install? XP, 7 Or vista?

[Scottybo2]

Hi! My mums laptop is very slow and it came with 7 but due to one of the ram sticks no longer working it's stuck at 2gb ram and it's slow and i thought vista was the answer? Apparently not it runs it but very slowly, Honestly i need a OS As i dont want her punching it! Thank you please someone help!

 

[MystoPigz]

How old is the laptop? If it is 4-5+ years old and is really, really slow, I suggest getting a new laptop. If it is less than 3 years old...do a fresh install of windows 7...

-MystoPigz

 

[Wolfshadw]

XP is no longer supported and Windows 7 was faster and leaner than Vista. Reinstall Windows 7

-Wolf sends

 

[Nizhny Tagil]

Win7 should be fine with 2GB. According to the min requirements, 2GB are even enough for Windows 10.
The 32-bit version should be less resources-hungry and it should still work with the original product key for Win7.
XP and Vista are now unsupported so they're not the ideal choice. Besides, laptops are more prone to run into problems of software incompatibility, so it's better to stick with the OS it was born with.
If you're not going online XP could be fine, though.

As long as you're not doing memory-intensive tasks (heavy gaming, graphics, audio production, heavy multi-tasking...) I think you're fine.

 

[manddy123]

Have you considered Linux?
I know it's different, but there are some "Linux Versions" that should run much smoother than any Windows. If she just uses the notebook to Web/E-mail and stuff like that, the OS shouldn't be a problem. If she ever need something like MS Office, the Libre Office is free and do the same job.

If you want to look, Lubuntu is a great version, should work perfectly fine.

 

[drtweak]

I have tosses Windows 10 on a older Toshiba Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz with 3GB of ram and a 250GB 7200 Drive and honestly it runs pretty damn good. Way better than I had thought. I did put on 32 bit as you really don't want to use 64 bit unless you have more than 4GB of ram or plan on upgrading but in my case 4GB was the max for the laptop. That is why a lot of Vista installs were still 32 bit back in the day as they usually didn't go above 4GB of ram even though they were 64Bit CPUs. Had someone said 64 bit is more of a resource hog so installing 64bit on a 2GB machine would actually be slower than if you install 32 bit.

 

[BrianVS]

Replace the RAM stick. 2GB of DDR2 shoudl run $10 or so, it did for the Core 2 machine that I have. Memory is cheap, and will make any of the OS's run much faster.

 

[Scottybo2]

I am gonna go for Posready 2009 which is windows xp but has updates until 2019