"Greetings: I have a Dell Per 6400 that came with XP as well. I now run Mint Linux on it. Setup was easy."

So far, I d/l the Win 10 MediaCreationTool.exe (ISO creator)and unbuntu 1604.1-desktop - i386.iso for windows10. How is Mint Linux different from Lubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus)?

Why not pull the live-cd images of each and see for yourself?

AntiX or MX Linux.

Very lightweight fully functional distros, to save space he cold just install AntiX Base version.

Have you considered an inexpensive Android tablet? A tablet would give your brother an easy, instant-on device for Google searches in his workshop, without hours spent learning a new operating system or the aggravation of using an old, slow computer. You can buy a cheap tablet under $50 with upcoming holiday sales.

Another thought to consider, some wireless carriers are giving away free smartphones with 2-year contract. With a device like that, your brother could have "Google in his pocket" (and make phone calls, too)!

I've seen refurbished Chromebooks from Newegg lately for the cost of a cheap date night.

Edit: 24 hours later. Sale is over. Price went up 6 dollars, but they are out of stock as of this writing.

2 members found this post helpful.

Update:

Using Windows10 file explorer I made a bootable disk out of the Lubuntu 16.04 ISO file.
Used the disk to boot into Lubuntu desktop on my Win10 PC. It sure is a lot smoother then
the last time I tried it many years ago.

My brother and I have several 'droid tablets and old notebooks I suggested we load linux on some before buying more hardware. The old Dell notebook/Linux will be used in his RC Airplane Work Shop mainly for Google searches and to record maintenance and repairs.
Should I delete all the XP files before installing Linux?
If I get time before I leave on Saturday I'll create some different linux bootable disks.
Does Lubuntu 16.04 have a file manager and are upgrades available?

Looking forward to installing it that old Delll notebook.

Thanks all,

mike

Hi Mike...

Just my opinion but if you or your brother suspect that Windows XP might be needed for anything down the road, I would create a dual boot system where both OS's can run along side each other (and you can choose after powering the system on which OS to boot into.)

Regards...

ardvark71,

Interesting statement, for years I managed the care and feeding for >125 PCs + network for a Federal government agency.
I would routinely dual boot my work and home PCs using the current and older version
of Windows until I rolled out the current flavor Windows (usually after the first SP was thoroughly tested. At this point I'm done with XP though it was my favorite flavor of Windows for many years.

No problem, I thought I would just throw that out there.

Regards...

Thinking about it some I'll probably just order more RAM to make it 4GB from Amazon then install it w/o telling my brother.

Hi...

If it's his laptop, then I would really encourage you to ask him first.

Regards...

If I was setting up a non-Linux experienced user with Linux, I'd go with Mint or Puppy simply because they tend to 'just work' on older hardware.

I installed Lubuntu on my old netbook, which I'm sure has much lower specs than what you're working with. The netbook is a 1st gen Acer Aspire One. I set it up to dual-boot and the Lubuntu performs much better than the XP on the same hardware. Where XP was becoming painfully slow, Lubuntu just zips right along. Lubuntu is just Ubuntu with an LXDE desktop, so it'll have all the updates that Ubuntu has, as well as all the software packages. It does have a file manager (PCManFM) and I find it about equivalent to the XP File Explorer.

I also have a Dell Inspiron laptop with an i-something cpu (the beefiest system I have) and I installed Linux Mint on that as the primary alternative to the utterly despised Win 8 it came with. I also installed Lubuntu to run my Kodi on, because when I'm using it as an htpc I need to have a bunch of network shares mounted, but when I'm using it as a laptop I'm invariably not at home. Mint is more polished than Lubuntu and comes with all of the multimedia stuff already setup. Lubuntu, being part of the Ubuntu family, doesn't come with any proprietary drivers already setup. For the Mint I went with the xfce desktop.

Xubuntu is Ubuntu with an xfce desktop and I had a hard time deciding between it and Lubuntu. I find that both the lxde and xfce desktops have a very comfortable XP-like feel to them. So if you liked XP better than any of the newer Windows, you may like either of these desktops as well.

When I'm "showing off Linux" to a devout windows user, I like to show them Mint. But when I'm actually working on the system, I prefer Lubuntu.

But I think you'll find that Linux makes it much easier to forget how old the hardware is... that's certainly been my experience.

su

My friend had an old laptop from the Windowx XP era(2001-2008). It was a Pentium M 1.6 ghz machine, and initially had 512 mb of ram, which I upgraded to 2 gb. I installed Sparky Linux which is livecd distro based on debian testing and it is still slow but more useable than Windows XP was.

Instead of using youtube via the browser install Smtube which will allow you to search and view videos using a program like mplayer/vlc/mpv. Install an ad-blocker like ublock-origin. But no matter what 1 gb is too little nowadays unfortunately even just to browse the web it will be painfully slow.

I have run Sparky, VSIDO, and Q4OS on 512M ram and 1G ram. It works for casual browsing and sites like this one. The performance was not stellar, but better than XP. I do not view Youtube on Linux, I use my Android phone for that, it has more ram than my current laptop. My take: you CAN run just fine on less ram, so long as you are selective about what you DO. If you want to go full multimedia, then I have to agree you need more ram. 1.5G is likely enough, but 2G or more will perform better. Having a muticore CPU clocked 2G or more makes a lot of difference. I think my slowest surviving has a Centrino Duo.

If desktop means little to you for some purpose (perhaps you need a firewall, router, web server, sftp server, etc.) then you can retire the slowest boxes to that usage and find something faster for desktop use.