Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

Arch Linux 32 on an Eee PC 1000HE 2026.07.04

KO | EN

I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009.

The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.667GHz. Compare that with the Intel Core i3 N305, a budget laptop processor released in 2023, which has 768KB of L1 cache, 4MB of L2 cache, and runs at 3.8GHz, and you get a feel for how poor the Eee PC’s performance is.

Those were the kinds of compromised specs that came with being a netbook, so there is not much point in complaining about how bad they were. Even at the time it was no match for a laptop, but it was still fine for light work like editing documents or browsing the web. By around 2012, though, it had become hard to use even for routine tasks. Programs kept gaining features, websites kept growing more interactive, and the netbook’s small HDD was aging. In the end, ultrabooks replaced netbooks.

And so the netbook went to sleep in storage.

A new operating system

More than ten years later, in 2023, I suddenly thought of the netbook again. The machine I pulled out of storage looked exactly as it had when it went in, and the tacky Windows XP UI that appeared after booting was just as I remembered it. It took several seconds just to open Windows Explorer, and the cursor stuttered while it loaded. I could not remember whether the machine had gotten even slower, or whether it had always been like this and I had once thought even this was fast. Once the netbook was out of storage again, I decided to bring it back to life and put it to use again, whether as a server or a YouTube machine.

My first thought was that Windows XP, whose support ended in 2014, had to go. Windows releases after Windows 7 required at least 1GB of RAM. Because the netbook had exactly 1GB of RAM installed, I figured I would need a lighter operating system if I wanted it to be pleasant to use. Ubuntu required at least 512MB of RAM, but when I had installed Ubuntu on low-spec laptops in the past, I had not found the performance especially good.

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