What to do with an old Dell Vostro 1000?

[spdfreak]

I have an old Vostro 1000 Athlon 64, 4GB of Ram, 60GB hard drive, XP and I'm trying to decide if it's good for anything. All I'd use it for is email, web, etc. No demanding tasks or programs. Will one of the linux distros run well on this? I'm assuming that since it is so old that linux drivers would not be a problem but I'm open to suggestions...

 

[VirtualLarry]

It wouldn't hurt anything to try. Many (most?) distros offer a livecd version that you can boot right off of and run without installing.

 

[ArisVer]

Go for it. It will run most of the distros, plenty enough power and ram. Try a few live versions and pick the one you like most. Mint would be the easier transition.

 

[spdfreak]

Go for it. It will run most of the distros, plenty enough power and ram. Try a few live versions and pick the one you like most. Mint would be the easier transition.

So, Mint is the most windows-like and easy to install? I played around with linux on a few machines about 5 years ago but never really spent much time with it.

 

[Blue_Max]

I've got almost the exact same thing in front of me... Win7 basic barely runs office with its 1.5GB RAM. I think moving to Ubuntu is in order... but it's not for me, it's for someone who needs to practice her MS Office skills.

 

[spdfreak]

Just a quick update- I got a 120GB SSD for 35.00 after a coupon I had from NE and I had a Win8 upgrade lic I've never used so I installed the SSD and win8.1 and this is a pretty decent laptop for email, web, etc. The SSD is the trick. Totally changes everything even though the laptop is only SATA1.5 and IDE interface. Still boots in 15 sec and is very snappy. I do wonder if TRIM works, though. Had to search around for a video driver for the Radeon 1150M and finally found a Vista driver that works. Also had to use an older synaptics driver for the touchpad but it also works great- 2 finger scrolling even works! Was the laptop worth the time and money spent? Probably not, but it was a fun experiment.

 

[gmaster456]

I've got almost the exact same thing in front of me... Win7 basic barely runs office with its 1.5GB RAM. I think moving to Ubuntu is in order... but it's not for me, it's for someone who needs to practice her MS Office skills.

Modern Ubuntu (14 is it?) is not any better on resources than Win 7. In fact I would say it would perform slightly worse on that system.

 

[gmaster456]

So, Mint is the most windows-like and easy to install? I played around with linux on a few machines about 5 years ago but never really spent much time with it.

Zorin is actually the most windows like from my experience. Probably because it was made to look like it.