Dealing with a netbook with only 1gb of ram

I bought a convertible too hastily on ebay without asking for the exact specs and now I'm stuck with a windows 8 system with only 1gb of ram and no apparent options to pry it open and upgrade the ram.

The experience is awful. Everything lags, the system has crashed 2 times in a day, I cant open more than 4 utility programs at once. Yet I dealt with 512mb of ram, 256, even less for years in the XP/2000 days and never had the same instability I'm dealing with now.

Do I have any options? I was thinking of somehow downgrading it back to an older OS or an apple OS since they were meant for this amount of ram. I have some sim ports not sure if something can be done using sim cards.

 

Win8/1GB RAM in 2017? Give it to someone you don't love as much as your most annoying/hated ex...

 

I could resell it on ebay but I don't want to go through the hassle and I would hate to scam someone even more inept with computers who would no doubt break it apart in a fit of rage after a day.

This is why I was thinking of downgrading it to XP or something. The problem is that I don't believe it's remotely compatible with a touchscreen.

I have an android phone for example with 1gb of ram. I can keep 35 tabs open, run 4 applications at once including a mobile game and text while browsing instagram. I guess the solution must be there.

 

Have you looked inside to confirm that the RAM is soldered and not upgradable (or, to save getting the tools out, run CPU-z and look at the SPD tab - if it is empty then that's an indication of soldered RAM)? Otherwise you can visit the 'bay and buy a Windows 7 disc with product key and see if that will install. You may need to find the Intel F6 driver for your chipset and nlite may help to create an unbloated installation.

John

 

A quick googling told me the ram is soldered. Besides its a convertible with no apparent screws so opening it would be another complicated endeavour. I will make a thread in the forum section specific to this model to see if anything can be done by opening it but I doubt it.

Would windows 7 really make a difference? I don't recall the OS being very ram friendly.

 

What about Linux? A light linux distro might be a good option...

 

Yeah I could look into that but I don't know much about Linux. Let alone how it would work for a low ram system.

 

More than likely it is a 32bit UEFI so W8, 81 or 10 are the only options. W10 seems to be less resource hungry but not by much.

 

You will probably be ok, lightweight Linux Distros are installed on raspberry pi's which have 1GB of ram or less if you look at the Beta boards.

 

You should do a search for the model number as a lot of people will have tried to upgrade the ram and you should be to find out if it is possible and if so how hard it will be.

Some ram is soldered to the motherboard for cheapness, some have a ram slot under the bottom of the notebook, some have the ram under the keyboard and require the motherboard be removed.

I have used the app below, it was made to reduce the amount of ram that firefox uses but it works for other apps.

http://main.kerkia.com/Products/Minimem/Description.aspx

John.

 

You mean I can't change it to a linux distro?

 

I would think it has at least one USB port (probably not USB 3.0, unless it is very new). I would try getting a fast (USB 3.0 - it will be compatible anyway) USB drive - say, 16 GB or so, and use it as "Readyboost" http://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-readyboost-still-an-effective-tool-in-windows-10/ . This option does still work under Win 10, and it might help. Good luck, Joe

 

Very true. I did this with an Acer Aspire netbook (purple cover, fantastic haha) back in the day and it definitely gave a bit more 'umph'

 

if it is a 32 bit UEFI then there right now are more than likely no Linux distro's that will work.

 

Is there a way to check that up?

Will do and report back.

 

I'm pretty sure you could probably sell that netbook for under 100 bucks and buy yourself something better for even 200.

 

I have tried installing Lubuntu on old c2d notebook with 2gb ram and legacy bios.
The system feels okay but once you start watching YouTube or opening multiple browser tabs the machine will simply struggle.
Light-weight linux is okay but it won't give you remarkable performance improvement if your system is really short in power.
And as said above UEFI bios requires 64bit linux distro,
but netbook is an old term and I wonder if it stuck to UEFI.

 

Since it is an off brand I am not sure what will be needed to check the bios version. I know with newer ones, like my Nextbook 11a, it is a 32 bit UEFI.

 

I'd recycle it, personally. It does not sound like a useful computer for typical year 2017 tasks.

 

The crashing could be a separate issue. I would take a hard look at the configuration and drivers - and note when the crashes occur. Especially check video drivers. Maybe we can help find the source of the crashes. Best, Joe

 

The Crashing happened shortly after the system warned that it was running short on memory. The screen became black and while I could prompt the time for some reason, it was as if I was stuck in the lock screen but with no visuals.

 

OK - things to look for:

• Memory leak - Good reason to reboot at least once per day. Later versions of Win don't do this so much, but there are a number of programs that still don't give memory back when closed
• Check for unwanted programs in the background - look at startup list (msconfig) to be sure you are not starting any unwanted programs at startup. Also, you can use the task manager to see what programs are running and what resources they are taking.
• Make sure all updates are installed (during the transition to Win 8-8.1, there were quite a few programs that had incompatibilities that showed up as crashes.
• Check drivers for the (limited) hardware. Device manager will show what is there, and you may find indications there.
• Check and clean up the hard disk - limited hard disk space or mangled programs (due to crashes) can cause more crashes.
• Go through list of installed programs and remove anything you don't use. You might find a few surprises there.

I hope this at least helps you get started.
Best,

Joe

 

Would this work with a sim card as well?

 

You mean micro-SD card?

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

It would work with an SD or microSD card, since, when connected via adapter or socket, they behave like a USB stick. I would pick a fast one, though most of the faster ones are faster than the USB 2.0 port which I suspect your netbook has. You might need to format it - I have seen information suggesting that it is more efficient to use FAT32 rather than NTFS, though the latter should work.
Best,
Joe

 

Any recommendation for a fast SD card?

 

Any Class 10 SD card will do, I think?

I'm using a 32GB Transcend Class 10 SD card in my D420 as storage drive and works very well. I got burned by Transcend before (a 8GB USB flash drive and a 512MB microSD card gone bad, happened like 7-8 years ago) but this one never disappoints me.

 

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Micr...8&qid=1485747135&sr=8-1&keywords=8gb+micro+sd

that will be more than fast enough, will give you plenty of ready boost space. One thing to note since I havn't seen what system you have is if your system uses EMC or a SSD for storage then ready boost can't be turned on.

 

Yeah it's an EMC. **** that won't work?

 

yeah, you won't see any benefit, since your storage is already essentially a sd card.

 

Well if it has an effect it's not particularly obvious. I still maintain, give me 1gb of ram and xp and it would run a lot, way better.

 

it really isn't down to the OS in this case, everything else is what's causing the issues. The modern software you are using (security, internet browser, productivity) is what's going to slow it down more than the OS, they are expecting more then 2gb of ram. Windows scales it's ram usage to the amount given to it. What cpu does your system have?

 

Intel® Bay Trail-T Quad Core Z3740/Z3775 1.46 GHz ~ 2.39 GHz Processor from the website. It might be a slightly older model but it should definitively handle these tasks. It really is the ram and how modern apps are so hungry for it.

 

Come to think of it, I do have a cheap Windows tablet with very similar hardware...


It's a Linx 7 tablet, the hardware specifications are:

• Bay Trail Quad Core Atom Z3735G
• 1GB RAM (soldered)
• 32GB eMMC
• 64-bit CPU with 32-bit UEFI

Note: Also known as Lamina T-701, same spec as HP Stream 7.

As you can see the spec are almost the same, though my tablet comes with a slower Atom. Contrary to you, mine is running very smooth with Win 10 Home 32-bit which I just reinstalled last night (given to my sis 7-8 months ago but she didn't even bother to turn it on, so the build was kinda outdated). It was initially sluggish, but after installing the chipset driver it's a lot more responsive, nowhere near i3 but no slouch either, web browsing is fine, video playback is fine, no stuttering etc. Definitely faster than my beefed up HP t510 thin client that I'm using right now.

Probably what you needed was a proper re-installation of Windows and drivers

But if you're going to Linux, you simply need to get a compatible 32-bit bootloader and replace the 64-bit one in your Live USB, there's one available for my tablet to do the job. YMMV but I'm fairly positive your netbook also has one.

 

Why not just return it. Its crashing so the laptop is faulty.