Is there one version of W10 that's fastest on an old laptop (t2400 CPU)? I noticed in VM that after limiting resources 19h1 opens the start menu faster than 21h1. I wonder if the older the faster? Considering UUP Dump with latest updates applied.
I would use ReviOS, a homebrew Windows 10 Pro 64bit version, which works on low-powered Netbooks very well! May you look here!
Okay, the cpu is weak (Core Duo, 2 cores, 2 threads, 1.83ghz), but the memory is ??? If you can get it up to 4 gigs of memory, and add an SSD, this might work out for you.
I would strongly advice NOT to use any chopped homebrew crap from very unknown sources, then better to go chop yourself, then you know what you have, still will lead to (future) problems anyway.
@Enthousiast: It's up to the user what kind of 'Crap' he/she would like to use. One thing is sure, the from you soooo liked original MS OS'es are full of such 'Crap'! Just think about that Telemetry 'Crab', or the 3 different Internet browsers which are delivered with the original Windows 10 versions! And, and, and! Also, Windows 10 is nothing less than a Resource Hoog! And how many apps are in Windows which could not be uninstalled at all?! To 'chop' a Windows OS on your own isn't an easy task, it's quite complicated and will need a lot of time as well, and for sure, isn't recommended for any 'normal' user! ReviOS was the first Windows 'Clone' which I really liked, in the first-line about the boundary to Microsoft's legal systems, and for sure that MS Activation system, which needs legal MS Product Keys! Secondly, the much less used Resources in ReviOS give the user the ability even to use low-powered machines with a much better speed than in full Windows 10! And they're a lot of users out there on Planet Earth, which didn't has the money to use high-powered machines because of their costs! That's just a few of a lot of existing facts, I just will stop here because humans like you have difficulties for understand such! Bye!
^yep EDIT: for some reason I applauded the Enthousiast post but in reality it appears as if I had applauded the pisthai
Hence my post. You can't do worse then most chopped/lite crap i have seen but better yet, don't chop at all. The problem here is the ones who review and heavily promote these homebrew stuff are usually "in love with it" and not having any objective view on it. I have no idea what you are trying to say with the stuff about msft legal systems and whatever you install on ancient or low powered systems, you will encounter the hardware limitations or the consequences from the chopping at some time.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but have you considered running one of the lighter Linux distributions on your old slow laptop? Some old computers just are not good candidates for Windows, be it Win7 Win10 LTSB whatever. There is a reason that Chromebooks (very low powered notebooks) run on Linux. Most of the arguments against Linux (and there are valid arguments against), are centered around things that are not going to work on an old slow computer anyway. Things such as gaming.
Linux is even worse for potatoes. Drivers are simply crap, hardware acceleration is broken or not performing meaningful acceleration and falling back to software mesa at best, the promising window managers are quite heavy in resource usage (think vista, x2) and require recent hardware with vulkan drivers and so on. At least on Windows even with abandoned drivers you can browse the web and play old games without the experience being a stutter / blur fest. That t2400 usually runs hot, so it needs proper drivers and power management to keep it under control. It's usually coupled with a on-motherboard intel GMA 900/950 gpu that has lame driver support and crawling performance due to software vertex shaders. In my experience, Windows 10 2015 LTSB is the limit, anything beyond gets unstable. If suspend-to-ram, wake-up-from-suspend work fine, and the cooling fan is silent on idle, you're good to go. If not, go back to Windows 7 (posready still gets updates and can get extended support even for pro or ultimate editions)
I don't have any direct experience with that t2400 cpu, but in general I have found linux to run better on old slow computers than any flavor of windows. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
Linux is always slower, drains the battery faster, and looks like crap. I installed LTSB2015 and it seems alright. Updated. All drivers from WU just grabbed modded drivers for GMA945 and even YouTube runs fluently on 720p. I won't use anybody's modded windows. I'm perfectly comfortable using MSMG, remove everything, install, run WPD, disable everything, run OOSU10, disable everything. Voila. If I need something even lighter I'd use Windows XP. Even lighter - MicroXP by Exper1ence. It's like only non-original software I trust.
Honestly the blatant spam of garbage homebrew builds should be considered spam and forbidden in the forums. As @Enthousiast said LSTB 2016 seems like a good choice. Linux works and it is arguably better if you know what you are doing, installing TLP for example but otherwise windows probably offers a better ootb experience.