OS speeds - for info only.
 

A netbook PC running Win7 had virtually ground to a halt when trying to browse with Firefox. I swapped the HDD for a SSD of the same capacity which made a negligible difference to the operating speed. I then removed everything I could live without from the machine but it didn't get any quicker so I took the plunge and replaced the SSD with another of the same and installed Mint 18.3 and Firefox with the same Adblockers etc.

This has marginally improved the browsing experience but it is still a tad slow.

Just thought I would share this in case anyone else is thinking that this would really improve performance. It has just dragged out the inevitable a bit.

Rans6............

It would be helpful to know the spec - CPU, RAM, etc. to make a meaningful judgement. Netbook PCs tend to have very low spec CPUs and limited RAM, plus low-end graphics capability, so it's not altogether surprising that the replacement of the HDD with an SSD didn't make that much difference, as the performance bottleneck lies elsewhere.

SD

machine is Samsung N220 plus with 2GB ram (upgraded from 1GB when bought) and now fitted with Samsung 860 EVO SSD 250GB drive.

Hope this is clear.

Rans6....................................................... ..

I suspect anything OS is going to be slow on that hardware unfortunately.

As suspected, the CPU is really rather weak - compared with an entry-level core i3 of the same vintage (2010), it's got less than 1/4 of the processing power. Add to that the minuscule quantity of DDR2 RAM, and it's always going to struggle to run anything at all modern. It originally had Windows 7 Starter, which was a cut-down version of Windows 7 for very basic systems, but all reasonably current (and secure) application software assumes way more compute resource than this device can muster, whatever about the OS. For example, my FF session has 5 tabs open and is currently utilising a shade under 1GB RAM. That would be about 50% of your entire system - and bear in mind that your graphics processor is also using some of the system RAM, so there isn't even 2GB for the OS and any applications. With so little RAM, there's going to be a lot of paging out to disk and, even with an SSD, that's going to be slow - and take up so much of the CPUs resources in managing the I/O that there's not enough cycles left over for actual applications.

It is around 10 years old now, so time to put it out of its misery. Keep the SSD for use in another system - it's worth far more than the netbook it's in.

SD - much sound info. I didn't really expect the change to Mint 18 to show a significant speed improvement but it still niggled me that I didn't know for sure. So, as the thread title says, for info only.

When I scrap the machine, which may be soon, I will have two 250GB SSDs and a 250GB HDD going spare. Just for info again, I have two i7 desktop machines running Mint 18 and both are built on 159GB drives so I can upgrade both....... for free.

Rans6.............................................