Unleashing the Potential: How an Old 4GB RAM Laptop Can Fulfill Your Coding Needs and Fuel Your 2023 Money-Making Journey!

bengaltiger
4 min readJun 22, 2023

--

Hello everyone let me introduce myself , I am a computer science and engineering student . So before I started studying computer science I wanted to try programming to see if it is for me or not . But here comes the first problem I did not wanted to spend any money for a new powerful laptop . So, I started finding alternative ways so that I did not have to spend much money at first .

luckily I had an old laptop with 4gb ram and i3 4th generation processor .

So I decided to use it to learn programming . But the problem is it is super slow . It can barely browse the internet and provide some basic computation . So logically, if I started with this slow laptop, then I would have a terrible developer experience, which will potentially make me want to quit programming . I wanted to solve this problem of slow speed and bad developer experience .

Here is how I fix slow speed of this 4gb i3 4th gen laptop .

I watched a ton of YouTube videos on “how to make your old laptop fast,” but they didn’t help much because all the tips were about removing preinstalled apps, turning off certain settings, disabling background apps, etc. However, none of those suggestions truly helped me achieve my goal of making my slow laptop faster.

Then I stopped watching those videos. I opened the task manager and noticed that most of my RAM was being used even though I hadn’t opened a single app on my laptop besides Windows. First, I have limited RAM, and more than half of it is being allocated to Windows.

After that, I started searching for the best alternative to Windows and discovered that Linux is known for its low RAM consumption, making it a suitable choice for my situation . But believe me when I say it improved but did not solved my problem totally , actually I installed Ubuntu with Gnome and I also installed ton of gnome extension.

Now that I’m using Ubuntu, I’ve noticed a significant improvement in terms of speed compared to Windows. There is no way I could go back. If you are in software development, using Linux is often necessary to perform various tasks. I loved it and could have stopped there, being happy with it. However, I was not satisfied. I wanted to squeeze more out of my old laptop.

After some research I found that there is many lightweight Linux distributions with lightweight desktop environment . After trying out many distributions I found what works best for my old laptop .

speed up any old laptop.

I used Arch Linux with bspwm window manager . It is a tilling window manager which is light and did not use much ram so this combo is perfect for my old laptop as it worked perfectly and I get the super power of key binding and shot cut way to do control my laptop mostly from keyboard and perfect for developer and I loved it .

Most of you who already know that installing Arch Linux and configuring window manager is not easy so I will provide easy solution . Use Archcraft os.

because it is based on Arch Linux with Bspwm window manager and easy it is easy to install . You don’t have to waste time making it beautiful because the default configuration is already visually appealing, making it eye candy . You can also choose to use Openbox if you don’t like the default window manager. Either will work fine .

It totally solved my problem it only uses 400 to 600 MB ram and it very beautiful providing a great developer experience.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW I LEARNED ANDROID DEVELOPMENT IN THIS OLD 4GB RAM LAPTOP THAN CONSIDER FOLLOWING ME BECAUSE I WILL SHARE EXACTLY HOW I DID THIS .

--

--