I’ve got a couple of older Dell core2 machines with ddr2. They still have good caps in them. They’re interesting to me because they have 3.5" floppy and sata cd/DVD and they can handle a newer os. Id like to keep something around that I can pop in an old cd/DVD or floppy disk or create disks from. I’m just stuck on if I should install xp, 7, 10, tiny 10, some flavor of Linux, they have vista stickers on them. They’re just in a weird spot where they’re not really vintage PC’s and not really modern anymore either.
4 ram slots with 1gb each. Looks like I could go up to 8gb maximum with 2gb sticks. They have core2 quad q6600 I think.
any linux will work with that, just a few demanding things like some games, running big VMs or editing gigantic videos or pictures could become a problem
I have no plans to do anything demanding with it. I have plenty of other PCs that can do that kind of stuff. I just want something I can fire up to run older software, possibly plug something into a pci slot, serial or parallel port, read/write floppy disks and CDs DVDs.
Oh yeah, in that case I’ll echo the other commenter that suggested Mint.
With 8GB, you could run any DE without worrying about RAM usage. 2GB DDR2 DIMMs are dirt cheap on ebay, so I would recommend maxing it out while RAM is still readily available. That CPU will still run most modern software at a reasonable speed.