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.
How much RAM? My go-to would be a light Linux install, ideally Debian w/XFCE if you think it has enough oomph for that. Otherwise, there are lighter distros that will still feel nice and snappy.
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.
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.
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.