I am a Linux man tried and true. That said, I woke up and saw a Newegg ad for a $59 HP machine with Windows 7. I read the reviews and one guy (I'm not that techie) said he was able to upgrade it to Windows 10 for free, which is what I would want to do. (There are some things I can only do on Windows.) Anyway, there were three comparably priced machines. Got an opinion on which might be best? Another suggestion? Link? Muchas gracias, amigos. Gregg

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIAAYZ8AA3963

The I3 for me

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...1VK-001E-1STW9

I have no choice on free desktops from City hall.
So don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Anyways, The 1st HP at $69.50 would be my pick. I'd throw in a extra ssd drive with the money I saved.

Edit' For used gear. I like buying from this place in Virginia. It is where I picked up 11 inch touchscreen atom netooks for 49 bucks apiece back when they were only a couple of years old.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/mclean-surp...1&_ipg=&_from=

Also. I bet there is a Illinois Goodwill Electronics store . Somewhere.

https://www.thebalanceeveryday.com/g...ations-1389274

I've been to the one in Austin Texas.

https://www.komando.com/wp-content/u...2/goodwill.jpg

Thanks for the feedback, rokytnji, and for the links. I buy stuff at Goodwill all the time but there is no Computer Goodwill store in Illinois. I wish there was!

While I don't see how you can go too far wrong with a HP machine, given they support Linux; You could always go a custom built machine (built by yourself or someone else), that way you can pick exactly what hardware it has, and therefore make certain that everything will work with Linux. In regards to Windows 10; as long as it's at least a relatively modern machine, then I can't see it having too many issues - just make sure it has enough RAM for what you want to use it for.

Personally, I built my own machine myself, and haven't had a problem with it - I only built it with Linux in mind. I could have installed the latest version of Windows on it at the time, and could probably install Windows 10 on it now - but I'm not interested in having Windows - and don't need Windows anyway...

Thanks jsb. Building my own machine will come down the road somewhere. Right now the big draw was the $59 price tag of the HP machine. But even so, how do I know it will support Windows 10? It's an eight-year-old machine.

Memory is everything.

That HP has 4G, see if that can be upgraded to 8G or more, especially if you plan to run W10 on it.

250G hard drive once again is limiting. Windows and your associated files you need it for can potentially eat up half of that drive.

CPU speed seems fine.

Just my opinions, and in fact I have about 3 or 4 thin clients just like that HP in my office. We usually buy them from CDW's Outlet store. NewEgg is fine though.

Add memory and a 750G second HDD and it'd be fine for me for quite a while. I have a 1TB drive segmented as 700G for W10 and 300G for Linux. The Windows side is about 30% full. The Linux side is about 2% full.

Look at it's spec's and then compare with the system requirements for Windows 10. Try and pick up a machine that has at least slightly better spec's than the "recommended requirements" for Windows 10, as then you should be able to have full confidence that it will support Windows 10 no problem - just and like I said before, make sure it has enough RAM for what you want to use it for though.

Regarding what your friend said, Windows "used to" allow a free upgrade to Win 10. Supposedly that ended over a year ago, however last year I had to re-image my system, thus bringing it back to Win 8. I was able to perform the upgrade, sometime about June of 2018. So I feel it is still working, so long as you start with a licensed copy of Windows, they seem happy to allow you to get upgraded to 10.

Thanks rtmistler. I think I underestimated what I could do for $59. Now I'm considering things like Virtual Boxes. And I had no idea Windows were such storage hogs. (Makes me appreciate Linux though.)

Thanks jsb. Makes sense. And I suppose it's much better to have too much rather than too little RAM.

Good to know. Thanks. One of those machines (in the first link) was upgrade-able (at Newegg) to Windows 10 but it cost another extra $30. By licensed copy of Windows that just means having a valid product key sticker on the computer, right?

The product key on that old sticker won't work for Windows 10. But in my experience, if that machine had ever been activated with a version of Windows, then a new install of Windows 10 done without a product key will come up with a status of "Windows has been activated with a digital license." Microsoft will recognize that motherboard and treat the Windows 10 install as an upgrade. It happened to me with a "Dead -- for parts only" motherboard from eBay that turned out to have only a minor problem. The OS that had previously run on that motherboard was Windows 8. Windows 10 (downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows10) installed onto a blank disk drive came up just fine, activated.

Thanks rk. That's good to know. Thanks for the link too.