Hello. I recently installed Debian Mate in an old laptop I've been using for looong time ago, with windows 7. I refused to use newer iterations of windowsOS post win7 so stayed in that version until now. I decided to setup dual boot for a transition period in case I require to use win7 for any sudden need that can't do in Debian. PC is Intel Dual CPU T3200 @ 2.00GHz with 2GB DDR2. I have an SSD at least.
The thing is, the system freezes sometimes, or get sluggish to the point that even the cursor won't move, and the sdd light activity is flashing all the time, so I have no other choice than physically restart the pc. I know this is because extremely low ram, sincethis happens mainly when tabs are open at firefox and playing yt videos. It did not happen that bad with windows7 though, there it just froze occasionally for 5-10 seconds (while the sdd doing a lot of reading/pagination stuff) and then it continued running in an far-than-ideal but "usable" way. Not in Debian now. Once it becomes irresponsive with firefox, it can stay like that for 30min or even longer, so I have to switch the pc off.
I expected Debian with a light desktop to perform at least the same as win7, and my guess it this difference relates to the way both OS manage situations when RAM is scarce. When I installed Debian with dual boot, by following some guide, I couldn't enable a swap partition -suggested by the installer to support low memory scenarios- because (and I didn't know this until then) my legacy bios won't support more than 4 partitions in the ssd. So 1 efi partition for the windows bootloader, 2nd for the Windows7, 3rd partition for the Debian boot and GRUB, and 4th for the Debian install. So I had to go forward with no option for the swap partition.
So here my doubts. Looking for ways that help to mitigate this performance issue at some minimal degree (no miracles with 2GB I know), do you think having a swap partition would help in some way? I can't have more than 4 partitons, so I'd like to know if would be possible to remove the windows bootloader in the first partition. Would just the debian boot partition (GRUB) be enough to run dual boot? I dind't remove the windows bootloader partition yet, afraid there may be some files there and risk of windows7 won't load after selecting it in the selector screen.
By the way, not long ago I installed Mint in a similar spec'd pc (just 3GB ram) and that one performs much better and won't freeze like this (even if runs slooow by having an HDD, not SSD). Also that pc have Mint in the HDD. No other SO, not dualboot, and have the swap partition the installer enabled by default during the install process.
The thing is, the system freezes sometimes, or get sluggish to the point that even the cursor won't move, and the sdd light activity is flashing all the time, so I have no other choice than physically restart the pc. I know this is because extremely low ram, sincethis happens mainly when tabs are open at firefox and playing yt videos. It did not happen that bad with windows7 though, there it just froze occasionally for 5-10 seconds (while the sdd doing a lot of reading/pagination stuff) and then it continued running in an far-than-ideal but "usable" way. Not in Debian now. Once it becomes irresponsive with firefox, it can stay like that for 30min or even longer, so I have to switch the pc off.
I expected Debian with a light desktop to perform at least the same as win7, and my guess it this difference relates to the way both OS manage situations when RAM is scarce. When I installed Debian with dual boot, by following some guide, I couldn't enable a swap partition -suggested by the installer to support low memory scenarios- because (and I didn't know this until then) my legacy bios won't support more than 4 partitions in the ssd. So 1 efi partition for the windows bootloader, 2nd for the Windows7, 3rd partition for the Debian boot and GRUB, and 4th for the Debian install. So I had to go forward with no option for the swap partition.
So here my doubts. Looking for ways that help to mitigate this performance issue at some minimal degree (no miracles with 2GB I know), do you think having a swap partition would help in some way? I can't have more than 4 partitons, so I'd like to know if would be possible to remove the windows bootloader in the first partition. Would just the debian boot partition (GRUB) be enough to run dual boot? I dind't remove the windows bootloader partition yet, afraid there may be some files there and risk of windows7 won't load after selecting it in the selector screen.
By the way, not long ago I installed Mint in a similar spec'd pc (just 3GB ram) and that one performs much better and won't freeze like this (even if runs slooow by having an HDD, not SSD). Also that pc have Mint in the HDD. No other SO, not dualboot, and have the swap partition the installer enabled by default during the install process.
Statistics: Posted by Milano — 2025-02-16 19:17 — Replies 4 — Views 132