I had three of these machines donated to me by a DR that I know. He had to keep the original hard drives because they contained patient info.
I had a newer 500 gig 7000 rpm drive and unstalled it after getting rid of the LSI SATA RAID Controller that came on the machine.
The machine also has dual NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 video cards.
My install of Linux Mint 16 went quickly and well but the crazy thing runs slowly. Windows open slowly, programs open slowly.
This machine has 16 GB (4x 4 GB) PC2-5300F DDR2-667 ECC registered Fully Buffered ram so I doubt the holdup is there. I have Mint 14 running on and old Acer laptop and it is lightning fast.
Everything worked on this machine from the beginning. Even 3 USB 3 drives connected right up.
Anyone know what I am missing?

What model of HP machine is it? It sounds a bit like a Proliant server of sorts, stand alone tower, rack mount? Video cards suggest a Workstation though. HP's big shout is always to make sure the Firmware is up to date, that's BIOS, nics, disks, controllers, iLO, etc, so identifying the system may help.

Play Bonny!

All three are 2007 or 2008 HP xw6400 Workstations in mid tower cases with 2 dual core Xeon 5130 processors. The one I am using here has a pair of NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 video cards with SLI cable connecting them. The others have less memory and only one video card. There is also a four port USB card installed and one each USB and Firewire port in the front. I removed an LSI 3Gbps four port SATA RAID card as I am not planning on using RAID on this machine in the future.With this card installed there would have been eight SAS/SATA ports.
There is on board Realtek ALC262 Audio and a Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic audio card as well as Broadcom 5752 gigabit ethernet which gave Mint 16 no problems whatever.
Whoever sold these to a doctors office really gave them a sales pitch. This is a lot more computer than they needed then or now except for the tiny hard drives.
I guess I need a trip to the HP website but wonder if any of the update packages will work with Mint. This machine originally ran XP 64 bit but Red Hat Enterprise WS 4 64-Bit was available.
HP really has a lot of available info for these machines online but not much in the way of modern upgrades for them.
I was surprised that Mint installed so easily. It even had drivers for my wireless trackball and Steelseries keyboard.

Mint has

for giving exact computer specs. Like video driver being used which is probably why things are so slow.

Probably something simple like that is my guess.

I guess Mint 17 LTS was not available when you installed 16?
Cuz it is now.

Is there any reasonable (no jumping thru hoops) way to update or upgrade to Mint 17?

I gotta good grin on a Friday night with that. Probably not.
My Mint 15 laptop I did a http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

before I later on do a download of Mint 17 Mate 64 bit (fresh install, not update/upgrade). It has not been a priority for me as I am
testing AntiX 14 files for another AntiX team member. I backed up mine to a external
usb hard drive before I do a clean reinstall (to keep what I wanna keep). It is a Samsung RV510 laptop that is a dual boot Windows 7 & Mint 15 Mate motorcycle tuner laptop. I run tuning software on the windows install.

http://www.mastertune.net/harleydavidson.htm

Gotta love DRM.

If you want to do a upgrade without backing up first and crossing your fingers.
Maybe painless. Maybe not.

then when done loading newest current applications and libraries

then when that is done processing

Without a backup. Sometimes you are the Windsheild. Sometimes the bug.

Thanks a bunch for the advice. I will be sure to do the backup thing because I hate a greasy bug smashed on my windshield. I went to the AntiX website and it looks like an interesting project but way over my head. I am kind of weird about keeping things as up to date as possible on the software side. I guess it is because I am more of a hardware person and don't really know about how software works. I do like to experiment with tech to stay busy. Old computers and old cars. Even old heavy equipment. I do have a newer machine that I built myself but am having some fun with these old HP's.

I'd suggest you try a new clean install. I get the feeling you have the wrong kernel. In any case, servers sometimes seem slow but do server work very well and very reliably.

How do I know what kernel to use? Is there more than one kernel available in a Mint distro or do I have to change to something else. I have no idea of the answers to these questions but have used
google and gotten no answers.
My Hardinfo system report says I have a Linux 3.11.0-12-generic (x86_64) kernel. What might be the best file system (existing is ext2 If I remember correctly) keeping in mind that I need access to a few USB drives that are NTFS formatted.
Thanks again for all the help.
Josh