Which OS for speed?

[ac3ds]

I currently have Ubuntu 14.04 I am looking for the fastest OS for my PC. My pc was running WIN7 but my cpu was constantly at 100% even after re formatting my hard drive. I am thinking about installing Hackintosh. Anyone else have a better recommendation should I get windows again?
My specs are:
RAM: 1.8GB
PROCESSOR: Intel® Celeron(R) CPU 900 @ 2.20GHz
GRAPHICS:Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset x86/MMX/SSE2
OS TYPE:32-bit (idk why Ubuntu says that my laptop came with a 64bit disk and it says on the box)
DISK DRIVE:244.0 GB

Thanks in advance!

 

[FAST6191]

Fastest and still usable for something general purpose would be some flavour of linux with a low impact desktop environment (XFCE if you still want a modicum of normalcy, start heading down the LXDE rabbit hole and you can end up in odd places), many distros will have a spin geared for XFCE but fewer will do LXDE -- you can run anything you like on anything but when it comes to things having the tools, the config and all that jazz I do prefer to go for one that is geared for it. You say 244GB hard drive so I assume it is a spinning rust drive as most would not have stuck a SSD of that size in there and kept the rest of that junk. SSDs right now are very cheap and a 120 gig one should happily be able to run an OS, browser and office stuff. If you were going back to windows I would try to get it up to 4 gigs of RAM (I am guessing you have two, with some siphoned off for graphics) but Linux should be able to manage with two.

That said why did you not investigate what was causing the CPU load? If it happened after formatting then you usually look at drivers causing issues.

 

[FireEmblemGuy]

Really it's up to you, and it depends on what exactly you're looking to DO. If you're just looking for web browsing, etc. (and frankly your machine isn't suited to do a whole lot else besides documents and media playback), I suppose Linux will be faster even if some programs aren't as well optimized as their Windows counterparts. In that case, Linux Mint is probably a little less bloated than Ubuntu these days, but if you were really worried about which processes are doing what, and you wanted a bit of a challenge, you could do an install of something like Arch from scratch. Either way, if speed and low CPU usage are your goals, I'd recommend switching to a lightweight desktop environment inside Linux.

OS TYPE:32-bit (idk why Ubuntu says that my laptop came with a 64bit disk and it says on the box)

Likely you installed Ubuntu from a 32-bit installer disc/drive - just because your original Windows install was 64-bit doesn't mean anything else automatically will be. With 2GB of RAM you won't see any real benefit from using a 64-bit OS, and using one actually might increase your RAM and HDD usage a tad.

 

[Duo8]

Try Debian or Arch with LXQt, or maybe XFCE. If you want it to be even lighter consider using just a wm (i3wm or openbox), maybe a lightweight compositor, and a display manager if you like interactive logon.
Or try this #! continuation if you don't want to set things up yourself https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

 

[The Catboy]

Peppermint OS and elementary OS arm wrestle the most when it comes down to speed and looks for distros. Both are best on Ubuntu LTS and both are extremely fast distros.
I would also like to toss, Puppy Linux in there, but despite being fast, it's more geared towards live Disc distro and not much for everyday Desktop use.
Some other runner ups would be, Manjaro, Mageia, Zorin, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, LXLE, Linux Mint (all versions are really fast,) and Bodhi.
Really 90% of Linux distros out there are extremely fast.

 

[mgrev]

depends. if you only do internet browsing and file storage etc. you could try androidx86 although android doesnt have nearly as much capability as other linux based distros have

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I currently have Ubuntu 14.04 I am looking for the fastest OS for my PC. My pc was running WIN7 but my cpu was constantly at 100% even after re formatting my hard drive. I am thinking about installing Hackintosh. Anyone else have a better recommendation should I get windows again?
My specs are:
RAM: 1.8GB
PROCESSOR: Intel® Celeron(R) CPU 900 @ 2.20GHz
GRAPHICS:Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset x86/MMX/SSE2
OS TYPE:32-bit (idk why Ubuntu says that my laptop came with a 64bit disk and it says on the box)
DISK DRIVE:244.0 GB

Thanks in advance!

You wouldn't happen to be using an Acer 5230E would you? If so, you can actually upgrade your CPU and give it a huge boost in performance. My dad had the same laptop, I was able to put a Core2Duo T7700 in it no problem and it ran so much better. It's super cheap (you can find a T7700 for like $10) and super easy to do, too (just open the bottom, unscrew the heatsink and switch CPUs, then install some modded BIOS to add the microcode to get it working with no issues).

If you don't feel like doing that, though, PeppermintOS that was linked above works wonders on low-spec laptops, and I put Linux Mint on my dad's laptop with the same specs and that ran quite well, too.

 

[ac3ds]

You wouldn't happen to be using an Acer 5230E would you? If so, you can actually upgrade your CPU and give it a huge boost in performance. My dad had the same laptop, I was able to put a Core2Duo T7700 in it no problem and it ran so much better. It's super cheap (you can find a T7700 for like $10) and super easy to do, too (just open the bottom, unscrew the heatsink and switch CPUs, then install some modded BIOS to add the microcode to get it working with no issues).

If you don't feel like doing that, though, PeppermintOS that was linked above works wonders on low-spec laptops, and I put Linux Mint on my dad's laptop with the same specs and that ran quite well, too.

I am sadly using a Toshiba C655-S5082.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

You should still be able to upgrade the CPU, you just won't have the luxury of updated microcodes for your BIOS (though it's entirely possible it already has them, no idea for Toshiba laptops.). Honestly, I would just get the CPU anyways and give it a try, at best you'll get a decent performance upgrade, at worst you wasted $10 and can just switch back to the old CPU and use a Linux distro.

 

[ac3ds]

You should still be able to upgrade the CPU, you just won't have the luxury of updated microcodes for your BIOS (though it's entirely possible it already has them, no idea for Toshiba laptops.). Honestly, I would just get the CPU anyways and give it a try, at best you'll get a decent performance upgrade, at worst you wasted $10 and can just switch back to the old CPU and use a Linux distro.

I might try that I just installed W10 and cpu was still 100, I found out that my laptop has a driver issue. I updated it and it now is always around 30.
I am also uninstalling all the Toshiba ADware it came with. If that does not help I will buy the new CPU.

 

[Captain_N]

fastest os for you is probly windows xp. its only a celeron 900. good luck with windows 7 on that. I put windows 10 enterprise on a dual core laptop i found in the trash and it works decent.

 

[The Catboy]

Peppermint OS, Bodhi Linux, Manjaro, elementary, and Lubuntu, are the fastest distros I've ever used.