OS Disks

[jwalker]

Ok, so at school today I was looking at some older computers in our Tech room, and found one of the computers didnt have an OS. So while searching I ran across a W2K disk and loaded it. Thats great and all except its an eval copy. At home I have 2 OS disks, one is Windows 98 SE that came with an old pavilion computer and the other is Windows ME that came with a gateway. My question is could I use those disks and load those OS's onto an old Compaq Evo. The reason Im asking is because the disks themselves have the brand names of HP and Gateway on them. Im not using XP because I dont have it and I couldnt find it.

[Juju]

Depends if those are complete OS installation CDs or only recovery CDs. If it's the former, it should work. In doubt, just try it and see what happens.

[jwalker]

I *think* they are full OS's, so Ill bring them in and try them out.
EDIT: I might ask our IT guy if he has some disks, If I found a W2k disk in a box, theirs bound to be more somewhere...

[Jim Bauwens]

Why not try a Linux distro ?

[Juju]

Yeah, in the eventuality it doesn't work, you can always try a lightweight Linux distro.

[TIfanx1999]

Ok, so at school today I was looking at some older computers in our Tech room, and found one of the computers didnt have an OS. So while searching I ran across a W2K disk and loaded it. Thats great and all except its an eval copy. At home I have 2 OS disks, one is Windows 98 SE that came with an old pavilion computer and the other is Windows ME that came with a gateway. My question is could I use those disks and load those OS's onto an old Compaq Evo. The reason Im asking is because the disks themselves have the brand names of HP and Gateway on them. Im not using XP because I dont have it and I couldnt find it.

If it's a full install and you have a serial key it doesn't matter. My friend had an old gateway comp that died and used it's copy of windows on another computer. The only funny thing was that the new computer it was used on thought it was a gateway. (IE the stats read out wrong, but it preformed fine.)

[jwalker]

I found another computer without an operating system... What version of linux would you recomend??
I know it has a pentium 4 and I think it was built between 2003 and 2006.

[Juju]

Linux Mint is a good starter distro I think (never really tried as I switched to Arch just before Ubuntu became generally unsatisfying), otherwise Fedora and Arch are good choices. Especially Arch if you know it and you want to optimize it for speed, installing lightweight desktop environments and stuff like that. If you have more than 512 MB RAM it's not really a problem though.

[Happybobjr]

I advise Mint Linux 11, it is great for the oldies.  That's what I use on my Pentium 4.

[jwalker]

Sorry about that if you were in chat, got kicked out of the library, this computer will not display the chat box. I have roxio, but the first time there was an error, so IDK

[jwalker]

Ok, got Ubuntu installed on the computer, and it runs surprizingly fast for a computer that only has 512 mb of ram.