help replacing win XP on old 'puter

[Chuck Wintle]

Thanks Tom & Curt. I've been exploring and found how to get around a bit. I've been using a Mac for almost 2 years and need to do a little re-education.
Paul

Paul, Do you still like this version of linux after using it for awhile?

[Paul Saffold]

Well, as it turns out I’m not using the old HP for internet music, which was my original goal. My wife bought me a Mondo internet radio by Grace Digital. I do use the HP to watch ww DVDs and youtube and FWW videos and a little internet surfing. However it is a slow computer compared to the Mac w/SSD that I’ve gotten used to. I suspect the slowness of the HP is inherent to the computer and not the Linux OS. Its hard to compare a 10 year old computer to a 2 y.o one. I do like having the old clunker in my shop. I don’t worry much about dust. The Linux LXLE is capable of much more than I’ll ever utilize and it is the only version I've tried so can't compare it to others.

[Garth Almgren]

And at the worst I know where I can find good magnets.

Yep, they're inside the hard drive!
Degaussing a hard drive with magnets is tougher than it sounds and is better left to magnetic tape media. If it's a spinning glass platter hard drive, the easiest way to permanently and irrecoverably destroy the data is with a hammer. Aluminum platters need to take a trip through the (industrial) shredder. Destroy the platters and ain't nobody putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

I suspect the slowness of the HP is inherent to the computer and not the Linux OS. Its hard to compare a 10 year old computer to a 2 y.o one. I do like having the old clunker in my shop. I don’t worry much about dust.

While I will never claim to be a computer expert, I worked on thousands of computers in my previous career. Based on my experience with HP's, I believe your hunch is right that the slowness is due to the HP itself and not Linux. While I love the old HP Laserjets, I would never own an HP computer.

Until a few weeks ago, I was still running XP on my 10 year old ThinkPad. I finally had to break down and do something different because of internet browsers and antivirus programs crashing on a regular basis due to XP no longer being tested when updates were rolled out. (The laptop & old apps ran great and were still fast. It was the 2015 data that was crashing.) I opted to purchase a Distributer's/Reseller Copy of Windows 7 as that can be used on a refurbished machine.

I cloned my whole hard drive just to be safe. I then wiped my XP OS partition and installed Windows 7 in that partition while leaving my data partition untouched. Having installed Windows 7 on other brands of older laptops, I was expecting it to be slow. I was greatly surprised that my old ThinkPad boots so much faster with Windows 7 and it runs considerably cooler than it ever has before while running XP. As long as the hardware holds up on my old ThinkPad, I plan to continue using it for as long as possible!