I sometimes wonder

[hobbit709]

Had someone bring in an old Dell 3000. 2.8 GHz cpu, 512 Mb RAM, 40 Gb hard drive-they wanted it wiped so they could give it to someone.
Somebody had put a bootleg Windows 7 Ultimate on it. It worked-after a fashion. Took almost 10 minutes before it fully loaded to the desktop and was ready to go.
I saved the 3 Gb data onto a flash drive. Needless to say I'm not putting 7 Ultimate back on it

[hunter]

1. It would be a fine linux machine.

My laptop is a Pentium III, slower than that. I put an 8 Gb solid state hard drive in it; an old Compact Flash with an adapter. Compact Flash is IDE.

That's more useful to me than the Windows 98SE the machine is licensed for.

If it has to be Windows there are some excellent 98SE, NT, even XP remashes hiding out on the internet.

Here's a place to start:

http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/95-microsoft-software-products

For the shady stuff, and there is some very excellent shady stuff, things that let you run some XP software on 98SE era systems, etc., you'll have to look elsewhere.

I don't use anything Microsoft anymore unless it's my own old software running under Wine.

[hobbit709]

2. Dell no problem.

My magic Dell XP restore disk will put XP on ANY Dell without needing product key or authentication..
Had some old DDR RAM laying around so I upgraded it to 1.5 GB.
Customer wants to give it to her brother who wants XP.

I have cracks for any version of Windoze that I want to install if necessary.