- May 31, 2011
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A coworker of mine gave me her old Dell Optiplex gx270, minus her hdd. I plan to put in an 80gb IDE hdd I have laying around. After doing some research online, in the bios, and opening it up, it looks like it has a 2.8 ghz pentium 4 and 1 gb of DDR ram.
When I took it I was thinking of using it as a simple PC to putz around online in the guest room. Maybe even attempt to use it as a DVD player, Netflix streamer, or media extender for the HTPC in the living room. But now that I have it I can't help but wonder:
1) Will the hardware support anything other than XP? I hate vista, but like 7, but could the processor/ram handle it?
2) Would the integrated graphics be sufficient for what I hope to do? If I were going to put in a video card what low to mid budget card (PCI or AGP only I believe) should I go with? After 4 years with a laptop and recently using the integrated graphics with my Sandy Bridge HTPC I'm fairly clueless when it comes to discrete cards.
3) Is the hardware so old that I should just scrap the idea and walk away with a free 15" LCD monitor?
When I took it I was thinking of using it as a simple PC to putz around online in the guest room. Maybe even attempt to use it as a DVD player, Netflix streamer, or media extender for the HTPC in the living room. But now that I have it I can't help but wonder:
1) Will the hardware support anything other than XP? I hate vista, but like 7, but could the processor/ram handle it?
2) Would the integrated graphics be sufficient for what I hope to do? If I were going to put in a video card what low to mid budget card (PCI or AGP only I believe) should I go with? After 4 years with a laptop and recently using the integrated graphics with my Sandy Bridge HTPC I'm fairly clueless when it comes to discrete cards.
3) Is the hardware so old that I should just scrap the idea and walk away with a free 15" LCD monitor?