Eunix said:
Ghost, I am going to keep it REAL for you. You need to take a different approach. Now I am a master at squeezing every ounce of usability out of my hardware investment and I still have a few P4 machines in my home network but they are primarily using BSD or setup as NAS servers.
I will also have to take my hat off to you for pusing win7 down to a p4. The best that I can tolerate is a M that has a little more kick but that is about it.
Ubuntu would be a little too heavy for your P4. Now there are a lot of distros out there but I would suggest that you try one of the Linux Mint distros. Mint is based on Ubuntu but it is cleaned up and it it lighter with a similar feel. I prefer Cinnamon.
Now if you have a few extra bucks, I would suggest that you pick up an old Dell Latitude D630 which will get you to true dual core and is a solid machine. A T61P will also do and both machines you can go to 4Gb of ram.
You problem is that you have too much OS for that processor. I will dare not suggest that you back off to XP (obsolete) but you can go back down a couple of rev levels to Windows Server which will do a better job of background memory management.
Now the drivers part of your question will depend on your exact hardware and applications for your video codec.
i know any recent OS will be a burden for a p4 but i just want it to play 720p in smooth fashion..dont know why it dosent when it can give 21fps in crysis2 (ati 5450)...since i spaced up one of my drives i will try ubuntu(for its freshness)...regarding linuxmint i installed 10.4 few months back but couldnt find d proper driver support so switched to win7 x64 (yes p4 ht has 64bit inst
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)...and the option of putting a few buks ..dosent help in my case as i just want to pull this pc for little time until my 4th gen pc arrives