Generally Hopeless

I have an old Acer Aspire One Pro laptop sitting around doing nothing so I decided to try to upgrade it as a basic browsing backup. The machine is 32 bit and comes with an optical drive, a maximum of 2Gb of RAM and a 1.6 Ghz processor.

The RAM is already maxed out at 2GB, so I ordered a solid state drive in hopes of improving performance.

I did a fresh/clean install of Windows 10, downloaded updates, then did all the usual performance improving things I could think of:

1. Disabled all the startup programs.
2. Careful defrag of the drive.
3. Power setting to "performance"
4. Minimal software installation.

I installed the 32 bit version of Firefox. I also installed the SlimBrowser ot see if it was faster.

After all of the above, I connected with my wireless network and gave it a go.

First impression is that it is dreadfully slow. Firefox takes a long time to load and SlimBrowser is not much better.
When I enter a Google search in either browser it takes 20~30 seconds to respond.

I realize that, at one time, this was a decent laptop and was useful for browsing, but for whatever reason, it no longer can deliver performance better than the old dial-up situation (yes, I remember dial up).

I had at one point installed the Ubuntu release of Linux. It's browsing speed seemed slightly better, but still noting to brag about.

Is this kind of performance pretty much the norm for an old 32-bit laptop or am I missing something important?

Thanks

I suspect that rather than it being the laptop degrading in performance, it's more likely the case that web pages themselves have become vastly more complex in the background since the laptop was released. They're no longer plain old HTML that were quick and easy to process.

Thanks to all who responded to my "windmill chasing"

This is more of a personal exercise than a real need.
dalchina: The 260 GB ssd was about $20 so not much investment. Thanks for the link to the similar attempt. It sounds very familiar.

RickC: You are definitely correct that web pages have become very complex and resource greedy. That is likely a major cause of slow google searches.

Megahertz: I installed Win 10 32 bit.

I will likely continue to play around with this old dog, but eventually, may end back on the shelf I pulled it from.

Thanks to all for the input.

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks Samuria

I checked out the link you provided to Chrome OS. The Acer Aspire One Pro is not listed as Certified, but there are several other Acer Aspire models listed. Also, the device requirements say 4 Gb of RAM, the Acer maxes at 2 Gb. It also specifies that the computer needs to be 64 bit or 64 bit compatible.

Based on the information in the link Chrome OS may, or may not, function reliably.

Thanks

Thanks 3nd.
I'm beginning to tire of the fight, but will look into Lubuntu.