On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Don <dr2@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
You can load open office (free) and have 99.99 of the functionality you'll
need.
Lots of people say this, and it's not wrong, but... it depends very
much on whether you need to interoperate with Microsoft Office with
very high precision. Imitations of Microsoft Word do not render
documents exactly the same as Word does. You may not notice if your
needs are rather simple, or if you do not have an eye for detail.
If you don't need to interoperate, then yeah, OpenOffice.org and
LibreOffice each have at least 350% of the functionality that you will
need.
The new flash, etc, won't run,
Um, it runs on the XP machine I'm typing this on right now.
and you can't download latest java
either, so depends on what you want to do with it.
You absolutely can download the latest Java. You can even install it.
What you can't do is get any kind of *guarantee* that current or
future Java versions will install properly or work properly on XP. I'm
running Java 8 Update 60 (build 1.8.0_60-b27) on my XP machine right
now. It's working fine as far as I can tell.
Also depends on the model and h/w config...you may be able to run win-7 and
get it to run 1/2 decently...
Aside from the fact that I don't recommend installing a newer Windows
version on an old XP machine, I would think that getting any newer
Windows version (legally) costs money. I thought one of the
requirements is that anything that he throws on there is free.
Bottom line for me is that there is probably still a lot of useful
life left in the machine. How valuable that is depends a lot on who
will be using it. If you can tell that the person is going to be a
computer geek (like I was when I was a kid), then it could provide a
lot of value indeed, because it will not only be a practical device in
and of itself, but also a learning tool. I mean, for those of us who
grew up with an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 but are still in computing
today, those old machines were not dead-end toys.
John Y.
midrange.com
