For what it's worth, I had Windows 7 on my HP laptop of a few years old, and just loaded Windows 10 onto my HP laptop last week. FREE.
Most of IT here is Microsoft, and the guy next door says he thinks everybody will skip Windows 8 (like they skipped Vista) and go straight to 10.
When I pull my other laptop (Toshiba, win 7) from under the pile of stuff we shoved into corners after the fire so they could rebuild the interior of the house after the fire, I plan to load Linux on it. That's plenty enough for my wife and the one child still at home with us. Libre Office too.
Microsoft's new executive team, looks like they're easing toward increasing their Open Source presence and offerings, with open-sourcing dot-net completely and some other things.
I can't say the Microsoft Office and other stuff I had on it will work, haven't tried it yet. But I've been using LibreOffice on my Mac and on my laptop for many years, happily. I'm a light user of it, but it outputs Windows format good enough for resumes and most plain document formats. The spreadsheet app is missing a couple of things that Excel has, to me not a big deal. I'm delving into some of the script languages, and I understand some of those have good conversion routines to output Excel files.
And, FWIW, the local Zend meetup organizer, Adam Culp, happily lugs his high-end laptop around with versions of Linux (Fedora I think) on it, does everything on it.
Alan
-----Original Message-----
From: PcTech [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 12:36 AM
To: PC Technical Discussion for IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries) Users
Subject: Re: [PCTECH] Thinkpad RSeries
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.
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