It's not a review. Some days ago a friend of mine got his hands on an old HP Compaq dc 7100 small form factor PC. It was looking rather good overall.And the curiosity came-in to see if the thing still works. It was built to run XP, based on the stickers and age.. After some time spent trying to find a linux distro able to run live from the DVD unit, as the HDD was behaving strange, i have found my special CD, my beloved CD with Simply Mepis 3.4.3 (2003-6) distro , that features KDE 3.4.This was in fact the Linux OS that woke up the wish to test as many linux distro-es as possible. Great looks in my view compared to XP. As this old computer was featuring 512 MB RAM.and a lazy 32bit Celeron D of 2,666Ghz, the system was not willing to cope with x64 at all, not many choices were there .Tested some old discs with Ubuntu 12.0x 32 bit and then Open Suse 12.2 (attempting to install on the HDD) and the time spent for this to load was enormous.Keep in mind Open SUSE usually takes time to install. While Simply Mepis 3.4-3 was loaded ,either running live or installed, the system delivered decent experience.The Live CD featured KDE apps like the Kaffeine and Amarok, and they were working out of the box.Loading old movies or mp3 worked just fine.The partition auto sizing of the installation on the HDD run smooth and fast, i have only inputed names and passwords and ""next,next,next". Great good looking, fast and little OS was this Simply Mepis 3.4-3. All that was needed was on the disc and everything worked out of the box. Keep in mind the PC is an offline one.The distro features a firewall though, but i doubt the old browsers (Firefox is one of them) are of any use..Nevertheless they don t make them as they used to, the OS-s i mean.To much bloat in some of the new ones as 512 MB were enough for Simply Mepis then, while now the amounts of RAM needed to run a simple desktop smooth are insane.. Got an old PC around ? See how ti goes with old distro-es just for the fun of it.
