I had a friend give a computer a couple days ago. His monitor died over a year ago, and he has not used it since. In fact, he never used it much anyway, mostly for email and very little net surfing, since he was not very computer literate. It is an AMD T-bird K7, running Windows 98, and the only other thing he had ever installed on it was Norton antivirus when he originally got it.

My question is, would this maching be capable of running XP, as well as other newer software? I was thinking of finding a monitor for it and hooking it up as a spare machine, and maybe run The Gimp on it for playing around with some art work if it would handle it. I hate to throw anything away that could have some use, my garage will attest to that, LOL!

Your thoughts please. And thanks ahead of time!

The processor is fine for running XP, the big factor with XP is whether the computer has enough RAM (memory).

XP only officially requires 64MB of RAM and 233MHz processor (it can be installed with less, given some hacking). In all reality though, XP runs like ass unless you have at least 128MB of RAM and a 233MHz processor though - it runs "well" with 256MB of RAM and it runs superb with a 333MHz processor and 512MB of RAM (I had this setup on an old laptop recently, worked like a champ for my travel needs).

Hope this answers your question.

PS - you can figure out how much RAM the computer has by going into the BIOS settings menu (start tapping the DEL key 3-5seconds after booting to get into that, normally)....OR just go into "System" section of the Control Panel to see a summary of the processor speed and RAM speed.

PSS - Microsoft officially stopped supporting updates for Win98 about two or three months ago, so it is a good idea to discontinue using Win98 on all computers! Hackers are going to start going nuts and finding all kinds of ways to get into Win98 computers over the next few months, now that Microsoft is stopping support. :)

Thanks man! Yeah, I knew about Win98, had no plans of using it. I will have to find a monitor next, so I can see what the details are concerning RAM.
While we're talking XP, where would you suggest buying a legit copy of XP at the lowest price?

That question comes up all the time. Seriously, I ran into a computer with a pirated copy of XP on it a couple weeks ago - Microsoft was offering discounted licenses for only $149 or some crap, which is pretty cheap.

OEM copies are the way to go.

Multiwave: $98 shipped for XP Home: http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch.hmx?SCriteria=AA39890&CartID=done&nextloc=

You can find it cheaper at some places, but I know MWave is reputable, I order from them all the time. I can poke around later and look for better prices - but you're basically looking at paying $65-100 for a license and disc, and it's only good for one computer :)