Rejuvenating old PC - overhear and software

Owain_Moneysaver

I have acquired an old PC (it was in the communal wheeliebins if you must know). Mobo appears to be Albatron KX400+ with Athlon XP1700+ pro. One stick of memory. 30GB ??? hard drive, DVD-ROM and CDRW.

The innards were very dusty, I have hoovered them out, and taken off the processor fan and dusted out its heatsink, and reinstated fan. Processor fan runs happily, little other fan on mobo runs, PSU fan runs. Processor sounds alarm after about 10 mins use - I think overheating, which is set in BIOS at 50degC. Is there likely to be an overheating problem?

Current software is XP Pro, but doesn't seem to work (usually locks at wallpaper with no desktop icons). Being a bit out of touch with current hardware, would this run Vista if I could (ahem) find a copy, or full fat linux such as Ubuntu, or should I stick to a lightweight linux like puppy?

catflea

Ubuntu was really painfully slow on my 1.2ghz laptop so I'd suggest a more lightweight distro tbh....

gaming_guy

my quad core phenom seems to be hitting them temps quite often at the moment (probably due to the hot weather).

If you were to try and run vista, i think you would find it terribly slow (it ran slow on a dual core 3.0ghz processor for me) and vista needs at least 2gb+ of ram to run at a decent speed.

I have debian with XFCE installed on an old laptop of mine (1.3ghz/256mb ram/20gb hdd) and it runs pretty well compared to debian with gnome and ubuntu (with the stock gnome WM).

mongoose2009

might be worth investing in a new CPU fan and some thermal paste.
Vista will run if you have at least 2gb OF RAM
slow but useable

Owain_Moneysaver

gaming_guy wrote: »

my quad core phenom seems to be hitting them temps quite often at the moment (probably due to the hot weather).

Might try setting the alarm at 60degC then. See how we go.

GeoffX

There is more than one Athlon XP 1700+ ( part numbers AX1700DMT3C and AXDA1700DUT3C ), but they should be fine up to 90C. I seem to remember my XP 1500+ would regularly venture into the 70s. You can find the exact data at http://www.amd.com/

fwor

catflea wrote: »

Ubuntu was really painfully slow on my 1.2ghz laptop so I'd suggest a more lightweight distro tbh....

Ubuntu 9.10 was painfully slow on my 1.2gHz laptop too, but the latest release (10.04) is quite usable, and it boots up quickly too. It's a major improvement for older hardware. As gaming_guy says, using Xubuntu instead of the default Gnome desktop in Ubuntu should help too.

catflea

Thank you for that, shame I've ditched the c.raptop now but I'm going to update the desktop to 10.04 at some point in the near future.

Owain_Moneysaver

Have reset the temp alarm to 60degC and it seems to be running fairly consistently without alarming. Have installed xbuntu to the hard disk and its a bit sluggish starting apps. Got Abiword not openoffice.

This is for a friend who has no computing idea at all so (a) no way am I letting him have windoze (b) I have installed teamviewer for remote access.

bonzer

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with gnome on an Athlon XP1600+ with 1Gb RAM now largely at defaults with no probs.

If it's sluggish, might be the hard disk is slow or iffy.

Owain_Moneysaver

catflea wrote: »

I'm going to update the desktop to 10.04 at some point in the near future.

I've learned the hard way :mad: don't try and update ubuntu, wipe and start again. Backup your data.