A quick hardware orientation tour of this retired netbook found that we should be able to run ROS Kinetic Kame on this computer. Getting a simple ROS Kinetic environment running would be a baseline test to see how it might perform as a robot brain. And for that, we’ll have to erase the Windows 7 Starter Edition on this hard drive with Ubuntu 16.04 “Xenial Xerus”.

A sticker at the bottom of the machine identified the default operating system as Windows 7 Starter Edition. Since this machine predated Windows 8 mechanism for embedded licenses, we know this hardware would not have an embedded license for Windows and erasing this drive would mean the loss of a Windows license. I decided a Starter Edition license was no great loss and proceeded to install Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 LTS, i386 (32-bit CPU) edition.

Installation was successful on this netbook, but it was annoyingly slow to use. Every action required a few seconds, starting from activating the logon screen to every single interaction after that. I don’t know if running Windows 7 Starter Edition was any more responsive on this computer, but I wouldn’t have wanted to run an end-of-life OS even if it was faster.

What was the bottleneck here? Was it the CPU? Was it the RAM? Was it the hard drive? Or perhaps a combination of the above, like a lack of RAM triggering virtual memory activity that is hampered by a slow hard drive? For diagnosis I appreciated the fact this little netbook had a hard drive activity light, a feature that has been dropped from most modern machine. Judging by the lack of activity on that light, I suspect the problem is a slow CPU and upgrading the drive to a SSD would have limited benefit.

Even with this pessimistic view, I wanted to give it a try. I had a spare SATA SSD already on hand so it shouldn’t take a lot of time to test.