2014-04-15, 12:34 PM
CrimsonJohnny Wrote:as this one is too terrible to warrant spending a penny on
If you're sure about that, you've decided to cap the functionality of your machine at whatever state it is. If you decide to continue using it, it's a matter of making the most out of a bunch of hardware handicaps.
I would slightly disagree with Zelkova in terms of Win7 RAM usage, since from personal experience, a clean installed Win7 would use about 300 MB of my old desktop with 1 GB RAM. I'm sure that number can be decreased with a bunch of safe tweaks to the system, which leaves about 70% or more RAM for whatever you need to run. Although that percentage may vary a bit due to some hardware discrepancies, I'd say that's pretty great for an old computer!
Drivers are weird, and slightly depends on what you can live without. If you don't end up finding Win7 drivers for chipset, audio, video, and network drivers (like me =[ ), consider staying with XP.
Maybe try Lubuntu if drivers and typical programs used will work with Linux. It's more memory efficient, I hear. Vista is evil, even with driver support. It'll be a downgrade from whatever you have right now.
TLDR: Make the best of what you have, and abandon it later for newer stuff. That's life
