I have dual boot on all computers here, one is WinXP and Linux 2.6. Once it is set up right there are no problems, and XP is easier to set up than other Win products.

I use LILO for dual booting, which is older than GRUB, but may be easier to set up (I say that having downloaded and read about GRUB but not having used it). LILO is the standard bootloader that Slackware installs (it does a fairly decent job of that but I still have to go in and modify bootloader settings several times before it will boot the way I want.
That usually needs to be done from the install CD boot. After getting Linux firmly established, it can be done from the working Linux.

Getting boot established right can be difficult, because of old BIOS workarounds, and because of hidden partitions. You can spend hours researching the bootloader recommendations (what I did), or you can post your fdisk printout and bootloader config file here.

On every machine I have 3 or 4 boot choices, mainly because when I upgrade Linux I keep the old Linux around on another partition until the new one is up and running. This is much safer than an all-or-nothing attempt at upgrading your sole partition. It is also possible to mount the other Linux partitions to store data on them, so all that space does not go to waste.

Once you can boot Linux there is no immediate reason to get rid of WinXP. From my experience, there will possibly be a few Windows-only things that cannot be emulated easily on Linux, and what those will be for you I cannot say. It is another kind of security, being able to boot it up on short notice. After a year or so you will know better if you can erase WinXP.
I have been trying to change one user here from XP to Linux, but the email in Linux will not work the same as on XP, yet (embedded stuff).

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ok, another silly question, after looking on google for the mint cinnamon 13 maya requirements I have to ask.....will my old in the closet, compaq presario 7360, 10gb had, 500mhz, 64mb ram pc work with it?? I have been wanting to have another pc for the house for internet only usage. Youtube videos and email checking etc. Might be slower than my dell c521, but it should be considering it is about 9 yrs old??? at any rate, if it will work, I will put it on as the ONLY operating system and use that one for my internet browsing in the other rm....any input?

I would not recommend using Lilo in any Debian (Mint, Ubuntu, etc) based distro. GRUB works 99% of the time and needs no extra configuration, not only that it is standard in Debian based distros so it is tested.

I have fixed the windows to linux trade off, not all that difficult. Apparently the linux is the top one listed in 'grub', it is simple enough for even me to switch to the windows or to simply allow the pc to boot up to mint 13 when starting up.
the biggest question I need to have resolved is this...my software manager will not allow ANY PROGRAM TO BE VIEWED, LOADED ETC.....it only shows ones that apparently were in the bundle of stuff already loaded when I loaded mint13. a few others are there, along with some I never ever loaded and dont see where they are...so I need to get software mgr repaired etc to work as it is supposed to. show me what i can load, and then allow me to choose something, and download it...thanks

I wouldn't even waste my time attempting this. Cinnamon is a highly modified Gnome 3. Gnome 3 requires alot of resources and your 64MB of RAM is about 1GB short of the starting point I'd even consider using Cinnamon or Gnome 3. That machine isn't "about 9 years old" it is more likely to be closer to 15 years old. It come out with Windows 98SE. Here are the specs. I had an Intel based Compaq the same age, still have the speakers, keyboard, and mouse (they were the only decent things in the setup) and found very quickly that Compaqs didn't like "upgrades" to newer operating systems.

In a terminal type, or coy and paste that will get your package lists to update and apt to compare your machine with what is in the repositories. If the software manager still hasn't changed then in a terminal type in, or copy and paste this, and post the output of the file here for us to see. Please use code blocks (use the # button in the editor window) to put things like this in posts. My guess at the moment is you have got a basic sources.list that needs to update its package list.

I ran slackware Linux 2.2 on a 166Mhz Gateway, dual boot with Win3.1, with broken memory (after I dropped a screwdriver in it, it only would recognize 16M) without significant problems. The Latest Linux packages may need to be trimmed down a bit to work well, and I don't know how much worse Gnome is than KDE in CPU and memory usage.

A COMPAQ Prolinea 5120e, dual boot of Linux 2.4 with Win98, was a precursor to this machine.
It was a real pain, mostly because of working around the BIOS limitations.

Your old computer will likely run Linux better than it runs windows.
If it is going to be Linux only, then you can wipe the recovery partitions too, which removes most of the problems and gets you more room.

I would recommend downloading an older Linux, like Slackware Linux 2.4 (uses KDE), for that machine. Or can download an older Debian, if you want to stay with GNOME.
Older Linux have fewer memory hogging features. Just don't expect it to compare well to a GHz machine. People get jaded by faster machines and get to expect that performance as a requirement. It depends on what you try to do on the machine.

The alternative is to just not install everything on such an older machine, and turn off some of the Windows-like features that are being thrown in, like the pre-search engines.

As a browser machine, it is probably the worst choice. Browsers seem to to be one of the most memory intensive, CPU speed intensive applications. Cannot even run an old browser on it as much of the internet requires new browser features to function correctly.
Mozilla Firefox is a memory and CPU hog.

I didn't read all carefully through to here so sorry if this was said but wanted to put a side note; in Grub on my laptop I have three Linux versions a computer memory testing tool and a game called Grub Invaders and on my nephews computer in Grub one Linux and xp, so I find it vital to change the time in witch Grub picks the first entry (at the top Linux usually (of course)) the default time is only five seconds but you can change it in the file /etc/default/grub "GRUB_TIMEOUT=5" (you must edit the file as root (careful) or use sudo)

I put twenty seconds but you could go as high as 1000s then in a command line run:so when you reboot no need to hover over the arrows.

Good to see you dual booting Graybeard19.

I cannot stress enough not to put an old unsupported Linux on an old machine that will see the internet just so you can have a machine running with Linux. If you feel like being part of a botnet then go ahead but if you care about your security and that of others stick with supported versions of Linux.

Here is what goes on when I go into the software mgr. Clicking onto featured list I get following ONLY
vic, firefox, opera, gimp, wine, thunderbird, pidgin, xchat, songbird, this is all!
all packages does not come up at all
internet has quite a few, maybe 100?
games only these come up none other
wine, kmahjong, scumvm, filght of the queen, xpenguins, (downloaded this, but does not work!)
cowsay, fortune mod, crawl tiles, crawl common, piano booster, downloaded this one
balazar 3-common, downloaded this too
OK that is all I can do so far in software mgr, have googled this matter and have no idea how to reboot software mgr and get it to get unconsipated...any ideas?

Hey greybeard19. I would suggest to start a new thread and post the question about your other machine and mark this one as solved.

To have good answers post the specs of your old machine. I personally dont think you can run Linux Mint on it, but there are others Linux distributions you can run on it.

One might be AntiX another one can be SliTaz also poppy Linux might work there crunchbang too and Archbang, and for sure Vector Linux. Their graphical inyerfaces are very light weight and therefore might work on your older laptop

But again start a new thread and mark this as solved
Good luck to you

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#deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ maya main upstream import
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ precise partner
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ precise free non-free

#deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu precise-getdeb apps
#deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu precise-getdeb games

when i click on the bottom source for games I get a msg that states
url not found on the server or something similar to that, tried various ways to get to that location, no luck....what have I done to my mint 13? it was working prior to my trying to download wine, not knowing it was already on there. All I did to stop the download was to restart the pc....hmmmmm

Have you run in a root terminal yet?

no longer plan on using the compaq presario for anything at all. Found some pcs on craigslist that I might get, or wait til spring and get one then...