Actually PAYING for an old PC! Arggg! Of my12 pc's, most of them were just given to me, like, "It's Broke! Take it away! "
Some were even deemed DEAD and non-repairable, while some were fresh out of the Dumpster.
Knowing how things work, or at least are 'Supposed' to work, makes is easier to refurbish them.
I do enjoy the challenge.
On the really old, 32 bit, machines, I've found that Windows 10/Pro/32 works great! And the addition of an SSD, makes a big improvement too.
On one OLD laptop, that was given to me, years ago, it had an 80GB HD and only one GB of ram. It ran Windows 8.1/Pro/32 fairly well, but I wanted to give it a little boost. So I maxed out the ram at 2GB, put in a 120GB SSD, and installed Windows 10/Pro/32. Now the little lappy is running like a real computer, almost.
Then there's the OLD eMachine, that is a putzer's dream. It has both Floppy Disk and IDE ports on the motherboard, as well as 4 SATA ports.
And, I've lost track of how many USB ports it has, but there's a bunch of them.
I can remember things I did when I was five, but I cannot remember where I got the eMachine. The only thing I'm sure of it that I didn't buy it.
It had problems, and sat unused for a long time. Last year I replaced the AMD cpu, and changed out the ram and actually got it running fairly well.
Supposedly it's 64 bit capable, at least the cpu chip is, but the BIOS won't have anything to do with anything even resembling 64 bit. So right now, it's been downgraded to running Windows XP on an old noisy IDE HD. It has a permanent home on one corner of my Electronics Work Bench, and I fire it up once a week, or so, to just fiddle with it, and remind myself of all the years that I ran XP as my every day OS. Those were the days!
Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
TM
