Is it possible to mount Mint 16 on an 10 year old system?
Pentium 4 runs at 1.73 Mhz, Physical space 768 MB.
Wanting to avoid Windows XP crash on April 8.

For such old hardware, you might try the Linux Mint Xfce Edition: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2534

Comparing your computer to the System Requirements, you are over the minimum, but below the "comfortable" recommended RAM, so you might consider a hardware upgrade (RAM is cheap) or else avoid heavy multitasking.

Another nice distro for old hardware is called Antix. Its hardware requirements are even lower than Mint Xfce: http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

The best possible way to know "is it possible" is to try running the distro in "live" mode before you try to install. In fact I recommend test-driving in live mode for several days/weeks because Linux has a bit of a learning curve you see.

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Mega-thanks!

FYI... (from MS website)

I'm running Debian with Fluxbox (because I like Fluxbox) on a P4 1000 with 4 GB RAM (I upped the RAM because more RAM is always the cheapest upgrade).

It doesn't like HiDef videos, but otherwise runs just fine. It's been running Debian since Lenny and is not running Sid.

You could try booting to the Mint disc in Live mode--that should give you a feel for how well it will work.

But remember that the live disk will be slower than the hard disk, so if it's a bit slow off the DVD it will be better once installed. You have about twice the amount of RAM needed for satisfactory use of Mint's Xfce version, so that should be fine. And no-one ever comes back indignant after taking advice to install Mint!