- Feb 13, 2014
- 31
- 0
- 10,540
Howdy!
Been lurking the forums for a while; figured it seems like a good time to jump in.
I've recently come into possession of an old IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre M55E desktop computer... it's not a half bad little system for being free from my University's upgrade process. Came to me with a Core 2 Duo E4300 at 1.8Ghz, 1GB of DDR2, and not much else, no HDD unfortunately, as it was easier for them to just trash the disks than take time to securely wipe them.
Well, I already have an Asus G75VW, but I figured I could do some light work on it in something like Blender, or maybe use it as some sort of storage server. I went onto the good old eBay and picked up a cheap Quadro FX-1800 for video and a slightly faster E6600... they should be getting here sometime shortly, and I'll be providing the HDD and sticking in another gig of memory, along with a Xonar DX out of the old Phenom II rig that's been retired.
Now, I need an operating system. My laptop originally came with Windows 8, which was replaced by my full retail copy of Win7, so that's out. I really wanted to put ArchLinux on it, and use Cinnamon on as a GUI, but there are just too many Windows applications that I'm going to be needing. Win2k is just too old to cut it at this point.
I can get a copy of Win7 Home or XP Professional for the same price. Win7 would be the obvious choice, but I also have several licenses for XP Embedded from a local busines back home, which uses XP-Pro as a host system to build an boot image... and wouldn't XP be faster on an older system? Security is of no concern... I still run a Pentium-MMX at 200Mhz with Win98, and it's doing just fine on the interwebs as long as you're careful with it.
What would you do in this situation? With either 7 or XP, I'd end up with a half decent little computer for $~100 total, which isn't all that bad, considering I have more than that in my G75's memory alone...
I hope this is in the right forum... it isn't really about any specific OS, but I'm not really building a system...
Been lurking the forums for a while; figured it seems like a good time to jump in.
I've recently come into possession of an old IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre M55E desktop computer... it's not a half bad little system for being free from my University's upgrade process. Came to me with a Core 2 Duo E4300 at 1.8Ghz, 1GB of DDR2, and not much else, no HDD unfortunately, as it was easier for them to just trash the disks than take time to securely wipe them.
Well, I already have an Asus G75VW, but I figured I could do some light work on it in something like Blender, or maybe use it as some sort of storage server. I went onto the good old eBay and picked up a cheap Quadro FX-1800 for video and a slightly faster E6600... they should be getting here sometime shortly, and I'll be providing the HDD and sticking in another gig of memory, along with a Xonar DX out of the old Phenom II rig that's been retired.
Now, I need an operating system. My laptop originally came with Windows 8, which was replaced by my full retail copy of Win7, so that's out. I really wanted to put ArchLinux on it, and use Cinnamon on as a GUI, but there are just too many Windows applications that I'm going to be needing. Win2k is just too old to cut it at this point.
I can get a copy of Win7 Home or XP Professional for the same price. Win7 would be the obvious choice, but I also have several licenses for XP Embedded from a local busines back home, which uses XP-Pro as a host system to build an boot image... and wouldn't XP be faster on an older system? Security is of no concern... I still run a Pentium-MMX at 200Mhz with Win98, and it's doing just fine on the interwebs as long as you're careful with it.
What would you do in this situation? With either 7 or XP, I'd end up with a half decent little computer for $~100 total, which isn't all that bad, considering I have more than that in my G75's memory alone...
I hope this is in the right forum... it isn't really about any specific OS, but I'm not really building a system...
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