Old computer : is it worth installing LL

[Jean-Marc B]

Hi folks !

Here's my problem :

As a member of a non profit association, I've been asked to help with the computer used to check members data base and book keeping.

It's an old no name desktop, from 2005, running XP, fitted with an AMD Sempron 2800 + CPU, 1.6 Mhz, and 1024 MB ram. Using it is a real torture as everything runs slow.

There's no way of booting from an usb stick, I've checked and rechecked the bios, the only option is to boot from an SD. As I haven't any at hand, I couldn't try it yet.

But I'm wondering : is it worth spending time on such and old piece of junk ? I've never installed any distro on so old a computer and so low tech, so I don't know at all what I'm getting into.

What would be your advice ?

[WytWun]

Apparently not all Sempron + series CPUs are 64bit capable - you'd need to run a tool like CPU-Z (if you can find a version that still supports XP) to confirm.  If it is 32bit only, you'd be restricted to running a 32bit distro, which excludes recent versions of Lite.    With only 1GB of RAM, a 32bit distro would be recommended anyway.

If the machine has SATA drives copying migrating the disk contents to a SATA SSD would considerably improve the apparent performance of the existing setup.  This could be done using another machine with the drive(s) removed from the original chassis.  I have a Duron processor (even older and slower than yours, though with 2GB of RAM) machine still running XP to drive some specialised equipment with which I've done this and while the lack of CPU grunt shows the basic system runs quite well.

That said: if you can get the data into formats that can be used by more modern software, I would advise against trying to keep this machine alive because at 18 years old it is going to fail sooner or later.  Depending where you are you should be able to get relatively inexpensively ex-business machines from Dell, HP and Lenovo that are only 5 or so years old but generally as well made as such things are these days.  Such machines can run the latest distros very well.  I'd be looking for - at an absolute minimum - 6th generation i5 (e.g. i5-6500) or i7 (e.g. i7-6700) CPUs, but machines with 7th and 8th generation i5/i7 CPUs seem to have become widely available here recently at reasonable (to me) prices.  8GB of RAM would be a minimum, and you shouldn't find it hard to get at least a 240GB SSD.  Some even older machines (e.g. i5-4590) might also be viable if the price differential to the newer machines is big enough to make a budgetary difference, but these machines mostly tend to have old style hard drives rather than SSDs which are again more of a failure risk.

[Jean-Marc B]

Thank you for the info. You've just confirmed what I had supposed. I'll try to find a more recent machine.

[gremster]

Jean-Marc

Don't know if it helps.

Had this the same issue back in 2005/8 roughly a old Packard Bell laptop with a BIOS boot off the Hard Drive (HDD), a floppy or a network card that was not fitted.

I discovered PLOP installed to HDD left BIOS alone to boot from HDD it me a USB boot option PLOP

It was still active as far as I know

Steve