Best Up to date OS for Retro PC

[domandric034]

On 27. 04. 2017. at 3:15 PM, Elastico345 said:

I've just restored my very first PC by scavenging all the parts from 3 old different PCs.
But i don't know if whats the best OS for my Retro PC.

Here's the Specs :
CPU : Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz
GPU : Inno3D Nvidia FX 5500 AGP
Alternative GPU if the first GPU failed : ATI Radeon 7000
RAM : 1GB of DDR400 RAM (i'm probably going to upgrade this to 2GB of RAM soon)
HHD : 80 GB +40 GB Seagate IDE Hard Drive
PSU : 300 watt PSU

I'm not going to use this for gaming obviously. Just going to give this to my parents for basic purposes.

Ubuntu or Debian

[dangeredwolf]

2 hours ago, Elastico345 said:

Updated the Topic :

*RAM is now upgraded from 768MB of RAM to 1GB of RAM
*IDE HDD is now with 80GB (Master) + 40GB (Slave) instead of 80GB only
*PSU is now upgraded from 160 Watts to 300 Watts

That's a decent upgrade.

Congratulations, you meet Microsoft's minimum requirements for Windows 7

 

Though something I didn't add before: Windows 8.1 is actually lighter-weight than Windows 7 due to their optimisations they made to get the Windows 8 codebase running great on ARM devices. Even though Windows RT was a flop, they still made it surprisingly lightweight. And there are many devices such as the HP Stream 7 which had a mere 1 GB of ram and 32 GB of storage space, with an Intel Atom. Which is actually not extremely far off from the specs of your computer you have now.

 

Windows 10 is also a viable option, and if you use Anniversary Update or later, you get its memory compression features, which might be beneficial considering you have only 1 GB of ram.

 

Since nobody else seems to understand whether or not you can run Windows 10 on a Pentium 4: Yes, you can run Windows 10 on a Pentium 4, but just not on a Pentium 3: For that you'd need Windows 7.

 

You've got a lot more options than most of the other people in this thread make it out to be. 

 

If there's anything I would do to that computer, is that I would scrap using hard drives and plop in the SSD, which is probably the single best way to breathe new life into old hardware. Most XP-era and later computers have at least SATA1, if not SATA2 built in, and while it'll be a bottleneck for sequential speeds, it'll still improve the responsiveness of it greatly. And 128 GB SSDs are available for around $35-$40 at this point 

[Dat Guy]

On 27.4.2017 at 3:19 PM, samcool55 said:

If you want to use it online you need to install ubuntu or something. Linux is your only option.

 

No, it's not. Use BSD.

[Google Fanboy]

If your parents are only going to be using it for web browsing I would suggest Chromium OS. You can either use the Neverware/Cloudready version or use the version straight from the Chromium OS website.   

 

Chromium OS is light, secure and easy to use.