help please upgrade from xp to anything which works!

EveryWhere

Not even one person has enquired as to the specification....
No one, other than the OP, has ever seen an HP Pavillion xd8000.

http://www.linlap.com/hp_pavilion_zd8000

GDB2222

EveryWhere wrote: »

Not even one person has enquired as to the specification....
No one, other than the OP, has ever seen an HP Pavillion xd8000.

http://www.linlap.com/hp_pavilion_zd8000

You don't know whether the RAM or HDD has been upgraded at some time. I'm running W10 perfectly satisfactorily on a 2007 C2D machine. It's a tad slow at times, but usable. However, I do have 4GB of RAM and an SSD. Mine's an E4500 C2D. Is that very much better than a 3Ghz P4?

I did check those specs before querying whether W10 would work. There's a video here showing W10 running on a similar spec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EksRYrLD5jY

Would Linux work that much better? I know there are some lightweight versions.

My feeling is that the OP has nothing to lose by trying a new OS, except perhaps rather a lot of time. She may even gain some grey hairs!

GDB2222

Might be worth checking here?

https://mashtips.com/lightweight-os/

EveryWhere

GDB2222 wrote: »

You don't know whether the RAM or HDD has been upgraded at some time. I'm running W10 perfectly satisfactorily on a 2007 C2D machine. It's a tad slow at times, but usable. However, I do have 4GB of RAM and an SSD. Mine's an E4500 C2D. Is that very much better than a 3Ghz P4?

I did check those specs before querying whether W10 would work. There's a video here showing W10 running on a similar spec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EksRYrLD5jY

Would Linux work that much better? I know there are some lightweight versions.

My feeling is that the OP has nothing to lose by trying a new OS, except perhaps rather a lot of time. She may even gain some grey hairs!

Of course I don't know. No one has even taken the step of finding out.

A lot better. Yours is a dual core quite capable of running Windows 10.

A.Penny.Saved

Carrot007 wrote: »

While I agreeregarind XP and the internet this has never been confirmed. OP was just mentioning downloading so VLC assumedly. I would just download on a different machine and use a usb stick, but XP is probably quite safe now on the internet as it is so unused no one bothers targeting it. Not that anyone sane would use it. Was bad enough at the time.

surfsister has mentioned wanting to play DVD's and do email. What email clients are still available for XP? Most recent clients do not support XP to my knowledge. surfsister has also mentioned Internet Explorer which indicates that her elderly relative might want to do some web browsing. Again XP is not supported by most modern browsers and an old IE will not support the modern web standards and will be highly insecure. From memory XP could only support IE 7 or something like that which is really old and outdated.

Linux really is the best option. And not hard to install these days from a USB stick or disk if you must! Last desktop distro I used was mint. Ran great. Don;t really use it now as no need, well except the filestore box which runs debian (which I would recommend except the pain of adding the non free repository so you can get proper drivers and stuff).

surfsister could download a live CD/DVD and run it to check out compatibility and see if she likes it. She might be able to check to see what software is available even if it cannot be installed. There are USB distributions which will run from a USB stick which can install programs which would give a more complete example of Linux and what free programs are available. It will not run too fast from a USB 2.0 flash drive but will show what it is like.

EveryWhere wrote: »

Not even one person has enquired as to the specification....
No one, other than the OP, has ever seen an HP Pavillion xd8000.

http://www.linlap.com/hp_pavilion_zd8000

I did question this in post #2 because I could not find a xd8000.
CPU-z should indicate the CPU that it has. GPU-z should show the graphics capability. Whether they will now run on XP I do not know. Older versions should work.
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/

poppellerant

It appears that the maximum RAM that laptop supports is 2GB and it uses an older, IDE, interface for the hard drive which could perhaps be replaced by an SSD such as this.

Depending on CPU support, you may be to install Windows 10 on it, but I personally would advise against it on this occasion due to the fairly low amount memory, even if it were maxed out at 2GB.

I am normally the first person to roll their eyes when I see people suggest Linux, as usually the machines are more than capable of running Windows 10 with a little nursing and care. But I agree with the others who are suggesting you install some variant on Linux on it.

I would encourage you not to use Windows XP, mostly due to security risks if nothing else. There are some tweaks to allow XP to receive some more recent Windows Updates if you want to eek as much life as you can from XP, such as this registry alteration. Also consider removing as much bloatware as you can, to help keep XP running smoothly.

EveryWhere

poppellerant wrote: »

It appears that the maximum RAM that laptop supports is 2GB and it uses an older, IDE, interface for the hard drive which could perhaps be replaced by an SSD such as this.

Depending on CPU support, you may be to install Windows 10 on it, but I personally would advise against it on this occasion due to the fairly low amount memory, even if it were maxed out at 2GB.

I am normally the first person to roll their eyes when I see people suggest Linux, as usually the machines are more than capable of running Windows 10 with a little nursing and care. But I agree with the others who are suggesting you install some variant on Linux on it.

I would encourage you not to use Windows XP, mostly due to security risks if nothing else. There are some tweaks to allow XP to receive some more recent Windows Updates if you want to eek as much life as you can from XP, such as this registry alteration. Also consider removing as much bloatware as you can, to help keep XP running smoothly.

It may actually support more RAM; https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/what-is-the-maximum-ram-for-the-zd-8000/td-p/3609647
If surfsister can come up with some more details, it would be helpful.

surfsister

sorry guys had hospital stuff with family member.

So more info!

hp Intel (R)Pentium 4 CPU 3 40Ghz
3.33Ghz, 1.00 GB of RAM
Physical address Extension

Windows XP

Any use??

surfsister

GDB2222 wrote: »

You don't know whether the RAM or HDD has been upgraded at some time. I'm running W10 perfectly satisfactorily on a 2007 C2D machine. It's a tad slow at times, but usable. However, I do have 4GB of RAM and an SSD. Mine's an E4500 C2D. Is that very much better than a 3Ghz P4?

I did check those specs before querying whether W10 would work. There's a video here showing W10 running on a similar spec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EksRYrLD5jY

Would Linux work that much better? I know there are some lightweight versions.

My feeling is that the OP has nothing to lose by trying a new OS, except perhaps rather a lot of time. She may even gain some grey hairs!

Yes I get grey hairs just thinking about it!! thanks

surfsister

Hi great so now the laptop has VLC installed but can't play the disc as it has no compatible dvd decoder. Any ideas where to get this??

thanks all getting there slowly!