I’ve got an old laptop with an Amd Turion 64 1.6ghz CPU, 4GB RAM, and a cheap SSD, all running the latest version of Windows 10.
I checked the temps, and everything seems fine. Devices in device manager also show up correctly.
I know it’s old, but the performance is really bad even for its weak CPU. Games that should run fine, from its era, are running frame by frame. Even watching YouTube is almost impossible—drops half the frames at 360p and less, and I’ve tried 3 different browsers with no ad blockers.
It seems like the APU is the bottleneck, but I’ve also got an old tablet and another laptop even older, and they handle these tasks without any problem. So something must be wrong. I’m wondering if it could be a driver issue? I’m not sure how to fix it, since the machine was just freshly formatted.
Sorry, but that CPU is super old—it’s 19 years old where I live!
You could try using a lightweight Linux distro, but I’m not sure it’ll even run YouTube with the modern codecs, since this laptop has no hardware acceleration features.
@ace
I’ve got an old netbook running Xubuntu. It barely handles 320p YouTube, but Floatplane works better, only up to 480p though before it starts failing. Local playback is better, but still not great for the 1366x768 screen.
That laptop is so old that I wouldn’t even run Windows 10 on it.
You’d be much better off with Linux, maybe something like Xubuntu or Linux Lite. I wouldn’t install Windows 10 on anything with less than 8GB of RAM, and for regular use, I’d want 16GB.
This CPU is ancient and can’t handle all the stuff Windows 10 demands in the background.
Also, Windows 10 is reaching end of life soon. You probably shouldn’t set up any new machines with it now. Windows 11 is picky about which CPUs it’ll work with, but at least that means your PC will be somewhat modern.
For an old laptop like this, Linux is your best bet. With modern Proton, Steam games work pretty well on Linux. The Steam Deck did a lot for Linux gaming.
@poppymon
Hey, I got this laptop for free, so I’m not complaining about its performance!
I thought about using Lubuntu, but I’m worried about drivers. The OEM sites are gone, and I have no idea where to find the drivers—or even if they exist anymore.
@Andi
I’ve never had to manually download drivers on Linux. Most things just work. Well, except once when I had to find a driver for my Xbox One controller dongle. There were no real Linux drivers for it, so I found a hacky one that worked.
@Andi
Linux doesn’t use drivers like Windows does. Switching to Linux will have a learning curve, but it’s fun if you like tinkering. When you install Linux, it detects your hardware automatically. However, because this laptop is really old, some hardware might not be supported anymore. Try Googling your laptop model plus Linux to see what other people have experienced.
The main issue is your CPU—it’s too old for Windows 10. For context, those AMD chips are only 30-50% as powerful as the first Windows 10 laptops from 2015, which were already slow.
I’d recommend trying the oldest supported Linux version (LTS) and installing a lightweight distro like Linux Mint on XFCE. You can try the newer versions, but they might not work well on your old machine.
What’s the exact model of the laptop? There are several Turion CPUs, and not all of them are the same.
You mentioned it’s old, but the performance seems terrible even for that weak CPU. Which games are you trying to run?
Also, you mentioned the APU is the bottleneck, but you said you have an even older tablet and laptop that run the same tasks fine. Those are different devices, though—tablets aren’t comparable to laptops. What other old laptop are you comparing it to?