Prepping an old computer?

[mattsleftarm]

Hi.

Firstly I want to thank this community. I've learned so much and I'm very excited to get started on my hyperspin project.

I've receiving an old computer from my in-laws (they've recently upgraded) and i want to know if there's a guide on how to prep an old computer (reformatting, deleting old files or general) to become a dedicated Hyperspin Machine.

Sadly i dont know a lot about the computer other than it ran Windows Xp and it wasnt very fast when they retired it. I'll know more soon, but i'm really excited to get started.

Hope you can help.

Thanks.

Matt

[dougan78]

I do not know of a guide. However best practice is to start fresh. So if it has a system recovery to factory state I would start there. Good luck.

[albert_c]

It might not be worth re-purposing for HyperSpin usage. If it has less than 2gigs of RAM and isn't at least a dual core CPU, just let it go; perhaps, install Xbuntu on it for secure web surfing and paying your online bills. But if has 4gigs of RAM and a dual core CPU, yes, start with a fresh Windows install. If not, pick up a Dell or HP Intel Core 2 Duo based machine off eBay for about $80 shipped and you'll have enough horsepower to enjoy all this emulation goodness.

Is it a name brand PC? If so you'll be in luck as just about all of the XP based named brand PC's have restore partitions on them and you can easily wipe everything off and start fresh with a new Windows install. Anyways, post the specs of your machine.

[mattsleftarm]

Ugh... you're right. i just fired it up and the specs aren't great.

Windows XP

AMD Athlom XP 2500+

1,83 GHz 1GB RAM

I runs everything pretty fast, but i guess i'll start looking for some used computers

Thanks for your help.