First, sorry for the delay. I’ve been dealing with health problems, walking in on a suicide attempt, a relative causing endless legal hassles, and other problems, but it’s nice to be back here again, among COMPETENT people who can and have helped get things done!
Here’s an update: The 2012 ASUS experienced a faulty hard drive- at least that’s what it appears to be- so its Windows 8 no longer works. The LICK installed Puppy Linux 6.0.5 no longer works of course. Luckily I had USB Puppy Linux 6.3.0 stick to load in the RAM, until I can get a new hard drive that is what I am using. I do not know how to create another distro on a USB stick except for the same distro.
Of course the poor Sony has a defective power supply (when it rains it floods) so it’s out for now. Even so I’m still interested in how far it can go. It is sad it cannot run games like “Undertale” unlike the Pentium 4 2003 Dell, but oh well. It is also a shame Opera Mini does not appear to be updated any longer. Years ago I stumbled across it for Windows CE and it was amazing what it enabled the puny 2006 Sylvania Windows CE netbook to do- it could even fully handle Deviantart and Youtube before those idiotic site script changes, and even now can handle some. In the case of Deviantart if memory serves it is the “static.parastorage.com” which is causing the trouble. If Opera Mini was to be updated then most people’s browsing problems would be no more.
Fenyo some time back said this- by browser he probably meant Palemoon 27:
“I've tested the browser with TwittchTv on an Atlhon Xp machine and it seems stable for hours, but only works if you have new enough ffmpeg, gstreamer codecs, even Precise isnt good enough, just saying video format not supported, but Trusty or Jessie or newer base is ok, i dont know whether Puppy has a newer codecs for Precise or even Lucid (Lucid seems to be too old for current usage, maybe Precise is the sweet spot for really old P3's, on an Athlon Xp/ K7 Sempron or Tua P3's with enough ram and with supported vga (Ati Radeon 8500+, Geforce4+) is good enough for currently supported Debian base (9+) distros, if the window manager is light enough (Xfce or lighter)).
Update: the oldest distro which has new enough gstreamer-ffmpeg for twitchtv is Centos 6, it has 3rd party repo called epel and nux-desktop, and it has newer codec packs than vanilla Precise, even though it has older base, but it was a really long supperted distro (2010 to 2020). I dont know whether it lighter than Puppy (always depend on the machine hardware config too), but Centos 6 in epel has xfce and even icewm packages, so you could config realtivly up to date system (support ended just november of 2020 compared with Lucid which EOL april of 2015) with light but outdated window manager, although Trusty or Jessie based distro with a newer and comfortable light wm is not seems heavier, so you have to try to be able to decide which one is the most suitable for your hardware...”
Could you explain that in more detail? At this point I’m willing to use the Sony as an experimental device, but would prefer to keep XP on it so it is a multi-boot device- how would I so install those distros? I’m no fan of Microsoft but I did like XP...of course if one knows where I can download XP that does not need those stupid activation codes FOR REAL- I’ve run into others making that claim but of course it wasn’t true, I wish people would check to make certain first- that would be nice. Microsoft “tech help” is an oxymoron.
I’m going to install a Linux distro on the ASUS when ready, probably Ubuntu since gaming and Internet activity are my primary concerns. I am assuming USB distros like the one I am using work via the ASUS itself so I can still use them. This would expand the ASUS’ abilities.
I was also told that I could install RAM upgrades beyond the extra 128MB for the Sony but this seems doubtful- it would add to the original 128MB and so you would get 384MB, 640MB, etc, which are weird numbers, and that’s assuming you get a card which can not only physically fit but would work properly. The Sony is model PCG-SRX77.
Thanks.
