How old is your computer - the sequel.

[Barry Titterton]

Hi All,

Thank you for all of your replies. I am very impressed by all of the
wonderful veteran machines that are still being used, and I thought that
I was doing well with a 9 year old machine!

You may recall from my original post that the question was prompted by a
conversation at a local (Windows only) computer training course. I, as
you may expect, talked to the tutor and students about how Linux was
good on older machines. The tutor then mentioned that they had three old
laptops that they no longer used, and that I was welcome to try putting
Linux on them. Two of the computers are old XP machines (Dell Latitude
D505, Pentium M with 1 Gb RAM) that were donated by the local Teesdale
council. The CPUs on these are non-pae so I am using Lubuntu with the
'forcepae' option on install. I have managed to get one working and am
going back after New Year to do the second. The third machine is a much
newer Win 7 Toshiba Satellite Pro (spec unknown), donated by BT, that
never worked properly and was quickly retired to the store cupboard. I
am unsure whether to use Mint 17 with cinnamon on this machine, or full
Ubunutu as Unity may be too much these very inexperienced (and nervous)
students. I don't want to confuse them by doing too much, too quickly.
Does anyone know if these desktop environments will work together if
installed on the same machine as alternatives? I have, in the past,
tried XFCE and LXDE on the same machine and it did not work well.

Regards,

Barry T