My latest bit of tinkering involved re-purposing an old 1G Atom based Compaq laptop that came with and continued to run XP. It had a good innings but I didn’t want to connect an XP machine to my network for the kids to use so I backed it up and burnt a 32 bit Ubuntu 14.04 DVD (I would have preferred Centos 7 but I don’t think the 32 bit it available yet). It all worked very smoothly and it even gave me the option of keeping XP, turning the venerable laptop into a multi-boot machine. Son now uses it for homework (and I’m getting more and more impressed with Libre Office). Everything works well but it is a bit slow. Useable but slow, but we are talking an Atom with 1G here.

Next job is to buy a PSU for another bit of scrap and see if it will run Windows 10…