Member Avatar for jbennet

Im kinda the person in the community who you give your old pcs to and here we had a massive rush to get vista which led people to give me quite a lot of "obsolete" P4 512mb Machines - xp is still good for two years at least and people are calling these machines obsolete?

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Short version: those older P4 desktops are far from worthless, but they do need different expectations and a little work. has a good haul — and is right to flag that perceived slowness often comes from software bloat, not just hardware. A few checks and small changes will usually make them perfectly useful for basic tasks (email, documents, light web).

Practical, prioritized checklist:

  • Clean software first: fresh OS install or image, remove toolbars/unused apps, run anti-malware, and trim startup items with msconfig (or the equivalent on other OSes).
  • Fast wins in hardware: increasing RAM as the motherboard allows, and replacing a tired mechanical drive with an SSD, give the biggest day-to-day responsiveness boost.
  • If security or modern browsing is a concern, consider switching to a lightweight Linux distro instead of relying on an unsupported Windows install; Lubuntu and Puppy are examples that run well on older hardware.

Quick tweaks that matter right away: uninstall heavy browser plug-ins, switch to a lean browser profile, run disk cleanup and defragmentation on mechanical disks, disable unnecessary visual effects and services, and keep auto-updates for AV enabled. For machines kept on a local network, consider isolating them from sensitive data if the OS can no longer receive security updates (see Microsoft product lifecycle for legacy Windows).

If building a cluster was just a joke from , it can be done (MPI/Beowulf-style), but for most home use the time spent configuring many old boxes isn’t worth the effort compared to consolidating resources or using one slightly upgraded machine. Further reading: SSD basics and distro homepages — Solid-state drive, Lubuntu, Puppy Linux.

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Member Avatar for DaveB

I had a look at the Vista requirements, and it said 800mhz/512mb, but also mentioned about "Vista Premium Ready" requiring 1024mb RAM.

Maybe they've paid too much attention to what the guy in PC World says. Windows 2k is still good for use today, and NT4 only lost support about a year ago. I think XP SP3 is coming out in 2008.

It's most likely that people don't distinguish between a slow PC due to poor software maintanance, and lagging hardware, so most likely after 2 years, think that they need something better, rather than a format with the XP Disk.

Sounds like you've got some nice free PCs, maybe you should combine them to make your own supercomputer

Member Avatar for jbennet

yeah but support is nothing

windows 3.51 was supported till 2002

xp home gets support for 2 years (was gonna end this year originally) - pro is longer

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