Linux

If you have a little cash to spare, I'd recommend upgrading this thing a little bit.

A 480GB SATA 2.5" SSD costs around €22.

8GB of DDR3 can be had for ~€10.

So with maybe €35 of investment (and probably much less if you buy used stuff from your local flea market app) you could make the laptop much faster and much more usable.

If you don't actually need ~500GB of storage, a 240GB SSD can be had for ~€12.

Lububtu is another lightweight distro for old devices. I've used it before on very old devices and it's great!

Thats the system overwatch:

Try something like Linux Mint with the Xfce edition. Might be able to lower the RAM a bit more.

Turn it into a plex media server.

It's crazy how, when you think in terms of modern windows requirements, a dual core, 1.6Ghz, 4.5W cpu sounds like a rock. But if you showed that to someone in the early 2000s running XP with a single core 500Mhz, they would expect it to be blazing fast. Linux gives you the ability to have that performance, along with modern security and functionality, even if windows won't 👍.

I also got an old notebook, atom N260 32 bits, 3GB of RAM. I put a 128GB SSD, then I installed MX Linux with Xfce (MX21.3_386) and it's usable for light tasks. Yes browsing heavy sites is slow, but everything else works pretty well.

I know many people in the self-hosting community re-purpose old laptops as lightweight web servers. If you're interested in learning Linux, this machine would be a good one to learn on for a lightweight distro.

The first thing is to get a total of 4 GB ram (looks like the max for this cpu) into it and an ssd. These are both very cheap atm. See if there's a video available for your particular model on the internet about getting into the case for the upgrade. Install a lightweight Linux distro. I have a similar 11 year old laptop and it's working nicely for browsing/video play etc. with Zorin Lite. Good luck!

I'm glad you succeeded at installing something lighter to replace Windows.

Have you search for buying more SODIMM RAM? Buying a 4 gig kit will allow for more room for things to run, and a 8 gig kit would allow the processor to run at full speed, assuming the graphics is also using up dedicated RAM space.

I've used Fedora Plasma and it never came close to using 8GB when using multiple problems, it can go a little over 4GB used. Even though it's a Celeron, the 8GB would allow everything to run freely at full capacity and use more of the processor instead of the processor wsiting on RAM and potentially swaping to the drive.

You can also look at GhostBSD if you want a default GUI desktop but want to try what FreeBSD can do.

You did good opting for a Linux distribution, but Gnome (Fedora's desktop environment) is still pretty heavy: they recommend 4GB ram at least.
I would suggest a more lightweight desktop environment like LXQt. The best distributions that ship it are:

• Fedora LXQt edition: if you're already used to Fedora commands and dnf package manager
• Lubuntu: probably the most user friendly for beginners
• SparkyLinux: for users that are a little more advanced but that has the lightest and most rock solid base (Debian)

Puppy linux would be fun to run on a machine like this one, but fedora with Gnome is light enough 100% better then win 10

Linux Mint would even be lighter

Just install xfce Or mate de with ubantu Or mint or any other distro except arch