Best OS For Netbooks and Underpowered Tablets?

vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by managing to give me a better battery life. I've been happy using XP Tablet on this machine until recently, when I started thinking that by optimizing the OS for targeted use, I may be able to squeeze more out of the device. So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop? Usage is typically light — web surfing (with multimedia), email, word processing, spreadsheet and reading PDFs. Also, what OS would you recommend for a ultraportable tablet? Usage is similar to a netbook; there's a little more document editing going on, and good handwriting recognition and note-taking software would be great." Read on for further details about vigmeister's question.

vigmeister continues, "I would like for the user experience to be snappy on a computer that is essentially running the equivalent of a 1.2 GHz PIII with 512mb RAM. The other objective for both of these is to maximize the battery life, as that is the major drawback of these ultraportables. A small memory footprint would work wonders, since the hard drives on these devices are typically slow and completely suck the joy out of using them when swap space is being used. Any tips? If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."

Are you kidding?

[HateBreeder]

You're naively asking for an OS recommendation on Slashdot?

talk about predictability of results...

OS/2 2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 32bit! And I just upgraded to 16MB of RAM and it FLIES! Preemptive multitasking is awesome.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Aminion]

Yeah, all the Windows ME fanboism is getting really old.

Underpowered tablet you say?

[Caboosian]

Clearly the territory of Windows Vista.

Re:Are you kidding?

[MimsyBoro]

Yeah, The question should be something like "Which flavour of Ubuntu would you recommend?" And maybe you'll get one "no but Fedora is also cool" but don't count on it.

Re:OS-X?

[Anonymous Coward]

It maybe because we're generally not crazed and oblivious Apple fanboys.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[Tubal-Cain]

Apparently, you meant to say "say".

Re:Are you kidding?

[calmofthestorm]

Really? I prefer linux myself, but ME definitely holds the edge for stability, security, and user experience.

If I were a power user I'd consider upgrading my linux to genuine windows, but us casual users can get by with a lighter experience.

Re:Surprise: Vista will work

[caluml]

-1, Must be hallucinating?