I’m posting from an ancient Dell Latitude D610 with issues.
Who really knows? It’s a crap shoot on the hardware reliability.
Software is an issue! Support for Windows XP is ending in April. There are numerous questions as regards purchasing a new puter.
Should I take this dinosaur to Linux? Pitch it into the recycle bin?
I had a work owned D610 with XP for ~ 7 years and it finally burned up last spring too. But work said they would stop supporting XPs anyway.
I really got use to XP but windows 7 had many improvements to it.
When I buy a home computer I need a laptop and I always try to get a fast CPU with lots of memory and disk space so it lasts.
Also, buy a docking adapter for your XP hard drive so you can use it without your old computer with your new one.,
That depends on what you want to do with the computer. If you just want to go online, check email and use Free Republic or OpenOffice then Linux would be a good choice. But what kind of Linux?
If you like playing games, you might not want Linux.
BTW: Just because support is ending doesn’t mean the computer becomes useless immediately.
Just a quick look... does it really have only 512mb of RAM?
don’t just throw it away though