old PC, what to do with it

[VirtualLarry]

Buddy has an old PC, he offered it to me. Seems too old to me to use, or even to donate to somewhere I know of that places PCs with low-income people.

It's running Windows ME, and system properties just tell me that it's a Celeron with 128MB of RAM. (I'm guessing P3 Celeron???) I can't even tell what CPU is in it, it doesn't have internet access so I didn't download and run CPU-Z.

I don't even think that I could shoehorn XP onto that rig, so it's useless to me.

But I was thinking, possibly I could get him online with it. I know of some USB wireless G adaptors that are cheap link , and I think that IE6 is available for WinME (at least I've seen one WinME laptop that I bought that had IE6 installed onto it).

I don't know what the last version of Firefox that worked with Win9x OSes was, possibly 1.5 or something, I don't think that any of the 2.0 code line worked, and 3.x and 3.5 are definately out.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

Firefox 2.x works with Win98 and up. I have a similar situation as yours, a P3 700MHz with 128mb ram and an ATI mobility RAGE 128 laptop. Windows 2000 and Windows XP give the same perfomance and are generally slow. I don't want to use a pre Win 2000 OS. Linux is also very slow and I don't want to use a distro that doesn't have a desktop environment. I had it running as a server with no GUI and that worked well. For desktop use though, it's just too slow.

 

[Blain]

The first step is to find out the specs of the PC or at least the MB.
Windows 2000 or even XP (no eye candy), can run on pretty slim hardware.
More memory would be a step in the right direction.

 

[JackMDS]

Windows 2000 can run well on computer like this provided that it has more RAM.

I still have a Celeron 600 MHz Dell Laptop runs very well as a sort of a Netbook with 384Mb RAM.

No matter what, WInME is Not the the OS of """choice""".

 

[PottedMeat]

Yeah just get a old PCI NIC for <$5 or a USB wireless adapter and install Win2K. Install some basic stuff like flash, acrobat, maybe VLC, and firefox. Whatever you do, get rid of that WinME.

 

[lxskllr]

I never had problems with ME, no more than any other DOS based O/S anyway. Puppy Linux is a very full feeling O/S that packs a lot of stuff into a fast, light install. DamnSmallLinux is even lighter, but it feels more stripped. You do get a GUI, and it's blazing fast. It looks much bigger than it's 50mb image would indicate.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: lxskllr
I never had problems with ME, no more than any other DOS based O/S anyway.

I've had good luck running Windows ME also.

 

[M0RPH]

I had an old Toshiba laptop with Pentium 166, 96MB ram and Windows ME. It did browse the web, albeit slowly, and really couldn't play any Flash video. I recently sold it for $35.

The problem with Windows ME is that you can't install Flash 10 and so, as far as I could see, can't use certain sites like Youtube. So it's hard to even say it's good for basic web browsing. Maybe there's some lean Linux distro you could install on there that would work better.

 

[JackMDS]

AFAIR WinME was an attempt to improve certain aspects of Wim98se.

Network wise the changed the TCP/IP stack to the one that is running on Windows 2000.

Some how this components did Not work well with the old parts and creatresulted in Network Problems.

Could be that just for simple surfing it is OK, but sooner or later the user might experience some sort of Intrenet/LAN difficulties.

However YMMV and if One is happy wiith WinME! so be it, it just an OS.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
AFAIR WinME was an attempt to improve certain aspects of Wim98se.

Network wise the changed the TCP/IP stack to the one that is running on Windows 2000.

Some how this components did Not work well with the old parts and creatresulted in Network Problems.

Could be that just for simple surfing it is OK, but sooner or later the user might experience some sort of Intrenet/LAN difficulties.

However YMMV and if One is happy wiith WinME! so be it, it just an OS.

I think the worst thing you could say about ME, is it wasn't 2kpro. It was a very poor decision on the part of MS to stick with a DOS based system, when they had something already released that was vastly superior.

 

[JackMDS]

May be that if all the people that waste most of their time on "Shooting Games" would spend half of the time on collaborated writing of the Best OS in the world they would come with something better.:thumbsup:

Nah, it is more fun to "Shoot", and Complain (or may be "Complain, and Shoot").

 

[sonoma1993]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Buddy has an old PC, he offered it to me. Seems too old to me to use, or even to donate to somewhere I know of that places PCs with low-income people.

It's running Windows ME, and system properties just tell me that it's a Celeron with 128MB of RAM. (I'm guessing P3 Celeron???) I can't even tell what CPU is in it, it doesn't have internet access so I didn't download and run CPU-Z.

I don't even think that I could shoehorn XP onto that rig, so it's useless to me.

But I was thinking, possibly I could get him online with it. I know of some USB wireless G adaptors that are cheap link , and I think that IE6 is available for WinME (at least I've seen one WinME laptop that I bought that had IE6 installed onto it).

I don't know what the last version of Firefox that worked with Win9x OSes was, possibly 1.5 or something, I don't think that any of the 2.0 code line worked, and 3.x and 3.5 are definately out.

i took my grandma old emachine that has pentium III and 256MB of ram and turned it into a smoothwall firewall for my home network.

 

[InflatableBuddha]

Heh, this thread takes me back a few years. The desktop I got when I started university in 2001 was a PIII-based Celeron (766 Mhz) with 128MB RAM, on Windows ME. I bumped it to 256MB and ran XP pretty well. Of course XP had fewer features then, and web-surfing was less demanding.

My grandparents are running W2K on a PIII box with 256 MB, and even today it's pretty zippy on the web, even for standard Youtube and Flash stuff.

However, a lot hinges on whether or not you can grab another 128MB for that machine.