So I acquired this desktop from a friend. Looking at the outside, it at least had usb ports, so it couldn't be that old. Popping the hood (man, was it dusty inside - I'll bet whoever owned it never took the cover off and vacuumed it) I saw a modern heatsink/fan combo, so that gave me encouragement.

Powered it up. It turns out it's a Gigabyte mobo, with a 1 GHz Duron cpu, and everything seemed OK. This would make a nice backup/internet computer. Now let's see what the OS is.

The splash screen came up, and it was loaded with XP Pro. Great! Lots of possibilities with that in there.

Once it started, I brought up the system information pane. Now, I'm used to seeing XP with Service Pack 3, or at least SP2. I do recall seeing one or two computers with SP1.

This one was SP Nothing. That's right - no Service Pack had ever been applied to this machine.

As I stepped back to look further, I noticed thare was no on-board RJ-45 connector, and no NIC. All it had was a modem.

Apparently, whoever owned it had just set it up years ago, used dialup for maybe email, and played a couple of games. I think I have the computer owned by the proverbial little old lady in tennis shoes.

Nah, the little old lady in tennis shoes that lived across the street had a W98 box. It did have a NIC, though, she had the low tier cable internet.

There is not much on the hard drive, either. No Office (any version), no Adobe reader, nuthin'.

I found a set of games he/she had put in, and they were trial versions. On one of them it said the last usage was 4131 days ago - over 11 years ago!

The thing is, the case is a non-descript one with no manufacturer's logo on it. It appears to have been put together from parts (nothing wrong with that) and then abandonded after trying it out. I remember reading somewhere that at the time (a dozen years ago?) well over half of all computers pruchased wound up gathering dust in closets because people didn't use them. Maybe this was one of them. It certainly has enough dust to qualify.

I bet the owner is still paying $24.99/month for the AOL account they used to use on this

Do you need an ISA NIC?

I remembered being grandfathered at $9.99/month as one of the first 5000 AOL users.

No.

It was made a (relatively) long time ago, but it still uses PCI, AGP, DDR memory, USB (albeit 1.1) and so on. While certainly not up to snuff according to 2013 standards, it's still probably more than adequate to handle my cable internet, play movies and the like.

I have found out, though, that it's been sitting and deteriorating (software-wise) for so long that it struggles to get booted and gives me a message about having to overcome a serious error to get there. I think I'll just grab the COA key and do a fresh install and be done with it.

Assuming I can get it.

I tried to load the little utility that finds the key, and it can't read my thumb drive. I may have to resort to a floppy (if the drive still works).

Ah, I love a challenge!

A what...?

If all you want it for is web surfing and playing movies, consider installing Linux. Linux is more parsimonious with system resources, so a lower spec computer will perform noticeably better under Linux. It's also a modern and secure operating system.

If you have no experience with Linux or think it might be too hard core, look at Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use. It "just works".

www.ubuntu.com

I have no problem with Linux. My last gig involved a lot of operating between Win7/WinXP/Linux/QNX/Busybox, so I had to get into the bowels of the OS from time to time.

I remember installing Slackware about 15 years go. Of course, then it was on a '386 and no X-windows, but I'm a command line junkie anyhow.

I do have a couple of odd computers laying around (can't have too many computers, I allus say) and I've been thinking about installing some X-nix just to play with. What the heck - get 3 or 4 going and network them all together and let them conspire among themselves to take over the world (Forbin Project anyone?)

Heh, excellent. Ubuntu and Mint are my favorite distros for desktops. Mint is based on Ubuntu but keeps the Gnome desktop manager. Ubuntu went with Unity a couple years ago, which many people don't like.

DSL (Damn Small Linux)
Puppy Linux

These have a very small memory footprint.

This

My suggestion would be to use Jolicloud/Joli OS. I loaded it on an old Netbook and I am quite happy with it.

i built a lot of computers from parts(before the sum of the parts became more expensive than the parts in a box).

those no name boxes had lots of slots, and usually a huge power supply. stuff now is cheapest that might work.

Well, if you're going to keep it on XP, you should be able to find a disk with the service packs somewhere. Installing SP2 or 3, defragging the HDD, and adding a good anti-virus/firewall combo, would be the minimum I'd recommend.

You can also easily get a copy of OpenOffice so you'll have some basic wp and spreadsheet capability, and of course install either Firefox or Chrome to get you a modern browser (I think IE 9 is the latest that will work on XP).