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A Win7 Desktop for 200 Bucks?

Now that I have the DVD, I may return it, unopened. Poking around yesterday, which I should have done earlier, I find that running W7 with 1GB RAM is dicey; MS allows it as the lowest acceptable level. So even if I get W7 to work, it might do so just barely, and what’s the point of dual-booting into that?

Any comments on W7 with 1GB?

Well it should boot, but don't expect to be able to do much with it. Even just internet browsing is likely to result in a lot of swap file activity/HDD thrashing and a very sluggish and laggy system. Something like that would be far better with XP or a lightweight Linux OS.

Might have to go back to square one, but with a:

Dell Refurbished Silver 745 Desktop PC with Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB Memory, 750 Hard Drive and Windows 7 Professional (Monitor Not Included) $212.00

That one looks OK, Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, reasonable sized HDD. It's no power house and it's not for FPS gaming. But it should be fine for most office productivity tasks no problem.
 
Well, I ended the XP vs 7 debate by over-repartioning the former to the realm of an undefeatable blue screen of death. And being that I got the W7 DVD just a few minutes before that, I said the hell with it, the time has come. I booted into it and let it spit out my eight years of XPosity.

Anyway, W7 is behaving so far, but I'm not sure I'm going to like it any better. Hasn't even thought about crashing yet. Never having an XP disk to save me, I installed W7 twice just because I could.

Thanks to all for trying to help, now I have to reconfigure my universe...
 
Well, after trying to be amazed for about two days, I'm not. I was correct in fearing that my 1GB would not cut the mustard... incredible lags, presumably due to paging. It's like having a thirty-year old computer that eventually does wonderful things.

Not wanting to buy more RAM for my ancient desktop, I guess I gotta get that Dell I just mentioned and spend another two days configuring. That leads to another question...

If 1GB was acceptable for XP, would 4GB for W7 be unacceptable, acceptable or better than acceptable?
 
I apologize for thinking out loud...

One thing these two days of trying to rebuild my binary universe is that with what I've stashed away on my separate drive, I can do it with anything, hardware and money permitting.

And with money being a real issue, and me already owning a Lubuntu CD, I could just let it take over my entire C: drive and kiss Windows goodbye forever. I could try dual booting again, but that was very messy.

There's a lot of helpful apps I've come to hold dear in XP, but I get the feeling that the Linux/Ubuntu universe has expanded to the point that it can be taken seriously.

Someone please tell me what I think...
 
Wait, so you're planning on doing a full wipe of the HD and start over?

Actually, when your starting with a fresh drive, dual-booting is even easier -- you can just destructively set the partitions the way you want and just point each installer at the proper partitions.
 
Wait, so you're planning on doing a full wipe of the HD and start over?.
Having destroyed eight years of XP tweaking one morning and replacing the entire drive with W7 that afternoon, which doesn't even work acceptably on this beast – yes, I see this as an opportunity to go in a new direction, any direction.

And now, to make it even harder to decide, I've discovered that I have the original HP System Recovery CDs, so I can make this box what it was in 2005. But if I do that, I have no idea if Microsoft will even let me upgrade to SP1/2/3 anymore, being that XP users are now obsolete.

So I can't really stay on W7 with this hardware, but I can go Lubuntu or revert to XP. And yes, I can dual-boot, but I don't think that would solve anything – it would just make the decision permanently unmade.

This is getting a little too interesting for me....
 
And now, to make it even harder to decide, I've discovered that I have the original HP System Recovery CDs, so I can make this box what it was in 2005. But if I do that, I have no idea if Microsoft will even let me upgrade to SP1/2/3 anymore, being that XP users are now obsolete.

You can. Windows update for XP will continue to function properly until April 2014. Failing that, you could always grab the SP3 Redistributable from Microsoft's Download Center.

Finally, grab IMGBurn and make ISOs of those recovery discs pronto.
 
Thanks again. At least I now have an XP option, for what it's worth. Will stay on this lumbering W7 until I finally decide.
 
I'll try and leave us alone for a while... except for memory problems, W7 certainly outperforms XP and the other OS outsiders promise no end of peripheral and software impossibilities. Someday I'll have enough spare cash to buy a real PC – I'll just try to improve my limping options in the meantime.
 
I've had XP at home forever, still runs well, but I have to say Windows 7 is pretty nice, it's on my work machine. Only 1G of RAM might be a little rough.

If you're going for a cheap desktop you may want to make sure you know what kind of video card slot(s) it has, usually GPUs become obsolete faster than CPUs these days.
 
Only 1G of RAM might be a little rough.

What he said. After a day of trimming services and simplifying settings, the best I see after startup is about 500MB free. So once I load Firefox and my eternal online poker game, I drift from 450 to 300 free. And if I do something else, uh-oh. Not the end of the world and not much worse than XP was, but still a bit crippled.
 
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