Maximum PC

Hi folks!

A friend asked me if he could use his old Gateway 2000 to browse the internet and do e-mails...it is running win 95 I said no as the system would be full of virii in about two minutes when signed onto the net as there are no firewalls and anti-virus written for 95 anymore. I recommended he use Linux and was wondering what flavor would run best on this machine. I would like to run Firefox and Thunderbird for his browsing and e-mail. Would a early version of Kubuntu work? I have loaded and run Kubuntu in the past on my old beater machine.

Nasty

Update:

As we are sitting here now the poor Gateway 2000 is on its way to its final resting place (The Dump).

It was a 200 megahertz pentium

It had 64 megs of ram no wonder Linux wouldn't load all the way to boot.

If I remember right there was a 5 gig and an 8 gig drive

I finally convinced him to un-cheapen and buy the wife a laptop.

Thanks for your reply's guys and consider this thread dead.

Get Xubuntu, its designed for old/slow computers.

http://www.xubuntu.org/

Thanks for the quick reply, I will try the Hardy Heron version as I have run that version in the past. I don't know when I will be able to install it but I will let you know how it works out.

Nasty

Kubuntu, and Ubuntu are both for newer systems (IE, KDE and Gnome require a bit more resources), but using a desktop environment like XFCE, Fluxbox, or numerous others, they'll all run in older systems quite well.

Definitely ditch Win95. It would probably run like crap, and finding software for it that you could actually use (a better web browser, office suite, CD burning software, etc.) would likely be a huge pain.

I've run newer Linux distros on older machines, but mostly ex-Win98 systems. Usually of the P-III persuasion, and mainly running headless as servers for most of their life. Actually using it day to day for web-browsing and such would be something totally different. Using a machine as old as yours would definitely suck for doing half of the internet browsing most of us do, like Hulu, Youtube, Pandora, etc.

Hey Guy!

Thanks for the input, I didn't think about running video sites....this could be a problem. I will install Xubuntu on his system and hit the net and see what happens, the worst scenario is it won't work well and end up in the dump. Then I will sit down with him and buy some out of date modern parts from the egg and make a new box for net surfing/e-mail....or maybe build a new modern machine and take his simulator machine (Athy 3500) and turn it into a Linux box. This could turn into a real fun project!

I tried Xubuntu on my old knock-around machine ( Athy 1900 ) and it installed and ran real well. I am going to keep that machine running with that operating system so I have an emergency machine for the net and so I can give my friend support....you know when you do something like this for a friend you end up giving 24/7 support even though you gave him your tail light guarantee!:shock:

Nasty