old old old computer?

Question

My brother has been messing around with computers lately, mainly on the internet, and my dad and i arent comfortable with him using our respective PCs. i have an old computer (im writing the specs from memory):

Pentium III 800 Mhz intel processor
256 MB RAM(actually less, about 204)
50 Gb HDD
56k modem

cant remember anything else.
Do you think this old heap of junk can be cleaned up and given to him until its beyond repair? its 8 years old.

another thing is that it has win98 installed. i want to reformat it but dad lost the installation disk years back, when i was a kid. win98 doesnt have support anymore, so now what... is there another (hopefully free) OS that can be installed on thes specs? or should i just leave the OS as is?

thanks for your help.

-shame-

sorry it got submitted twice by accident

Answer 1

For just using it to surf the web it should be fine. It is very slow as you have indicated and just running windows 98 shouldn't be a problem. Make sure you have some sort of antivirus program on there, there are several free versions out there. You could also look at installing Linux. There are some very good distributions such as Ubuntu that will work great on that system... some even can get had in a live format where you just boot to the CD and don't have to install a thing.

Answer 2

Oh, hell yeah! That computer will run MANY operating systems. It could even run XP if you had a copy.

Try either Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.kubuntu.org/

I run Kubuntu on a computer even older than that (600 Mhz, 40 GB hard drive, 256 MB RAM), so I know it will run well on that.

I also upgraded an older PC once, with a 333 Mhz Celeron and 256 MB of RAM, to Xubuntu. Try Xubuntu if you you don't like the speed of Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

Well, the modem probably won't work. But everything else will work fine.

Answer 3

You could try another os, like ubuntu or some other linux distro. You can get free cheesy games on ubuntu and it is fairly simple to use. You may have problems getting video, sound, internet drivers to work. personally i would use it as a carputer and hook it to the radio in my car and just load it with mp3's for those long road trips.

Answer 4

Yea, doesnt sound to old.....Might need 256 mb more of ram, and it will be good to go......as for the OS, Im not going to tell you to do anything illegal like "BURN A COPY OF SOMEONES WIN XP" (lol), but you could and upgrade for about $99 of XP or Vista, but you will need a copy of Win 98 to upgrade.....

Answer 5

Try some Linux distrubtions.

It should be OK for web browsing, if you have Dial-Up.
Otherwise, you'll need a LAN card.