Re: More mileage from an ancient machine

On 06/29/2007 09:56 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
NoOp wrote:
Don't even bother attempting to install Ubuntu, Xubuntu, etc., on the
machine. Your best best is to buy an old copy of Win95 and MSOffice97
and run that. You can experiment with Knoppix & DSL, but if you really
want to maintain a useful machine (albeit with a poor OS) that can
reasonably run an office suite stick to Win95/MSO97 on the machine.
Don't even try Win2K or Win2KP. Sorry, but IMO that is your best bet.

Are you really saying there aren't distros less resource-hungry than
Win2K+MSOffice. I find that highly unlikely. If nothing else you can
use Fluxbuntu with AbiWord and probably get better performance than Win2K.

Matt Flaschen


<quote>
reasonably run an office suite stick to Win95/MSO97
</quote>

AbiWord is *not* an office suite and OpenOffice 2.x will barely run a
machine like that. I'm talking about being able to "reasonably" run an
"office suite", and sorry, I should have prefaced that more clearly at
the start. I have an old HP Vectra (75Mhz/32Mb) running Win95/MSO97 that
just last week I put side-by-side to next to a 650Mhz/256Mb) running
Ubuntu & OpenOffice 2.2; the Vectra-Win95/MSO97 blows the OOo 2.2
machine away in terms of responsiveness, and overall usefullness in
running the office suites.

Don't get me wrong, were it my laptop I'd rip out whatever is on it and
tinker with all sorts of distros. (BTW: I now *only* run linux &
OpenOffice except when dual booting in to Windows to troubleshoot a
customer's problem. I also run Ubuntu server w/desktop on a 300Mhz/256Mb
just fine - but I don't use OOo on that machine for anything really
useful.) But it's not my laptop (or his), it's someone elses laptop. My
guess is that it probably already has Win95 & MSO97 on it; and so my
suggestion would be to clean off the games, other unnecessary stuff
(yeah I know... Win), tune it and it's probably fine as is. Plus you'll
already have all of the vido, audio, interfaces working.

The newer OS's & Office Suites have gotten so bloated that sometimes
it's better to leave the old stuff in place.


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