Preparing for Windows Vista End of Support, April 11, 2017

redeploying the hardware

[engine]

I've reached the point where the sole remaining Windows Vista machine will be closed down for good after Windows Vista support ends after April 11, 2017.
The legacy software on the machine has reached the stage where it's so old that there no point in updating it. The machine and the software worked perfectly, so i didn't want to change anything.

I plan to give the machine a new lease of life while it still works and to have it run Ubuntu. Hopefully, it'll keep running for a little while longer, although its hardware is on borrowed time. Not exactly sure what i'll run on it just yet, although i'm open to ideas.

Preparing for Windows Vista End of Support, April 11, 2017 [support.microsoft.com]

[IanCP]

I should imagine the Vista Machine [CPU] could not run a later OS anyway - I have several of those PC's. I once toyed with the idea of turning one into a NAS server until I found far better options suiting my personal requirements.

[billzo]

Ubuntu desktop is a good choice and there is a very active and helpful community to help you if you have questions. The "best" Linux desktop rankings change over time, but Ubuntu is one of the better choices in my opinion.

If you are running Windows, you can download a copy of VirtualBox and virtualize several different Linux distributions to decide which one you like best. It's quite easy to do using VirtualBox.

[keyplyr]

I installed Vista on two machines; both were a disaster... good riddance.

[tangor]

Won't be sorry to see Vista go ... never really had that large and uptake in real world terms XP, on the other hand, might get some support (if you are large enough and cash enough) for a few years longer. But Vista .... no real love there!

As for the old hardware, I've set many of those up as mail servers and in that function they chug along just great.

[ambt]

Good riddance indeed. I don't even remember much about it, I only remember that it was very bad. Win 7 was a huge improvement and I liked it very much.

[Hoople]

For these machines a low resource usage Ubuntu variant Lubuntu is a distro worth checking out.

Boot from DVD is one option to explore before installation. FWIW the Lubuntu memory usage on fresh boot is ~200mb, about one fifth of Vista.

Most of those machines shipped with 4gb or less (some 2gb, a few 512mb), so a thrifty boot-up consumption is highly advantageous.

[engine]

Thanks for the ideas.
Yeah, I won't be sorry to see it go, when I get the chance.

I gave up running mailservers with newsletters a long while back, driven by the problem of getting mail through the more challenging anti-spam filters.

Still not sure what to do with the machine, even if its hardware is old.

[tangor]

One could always load it with Linix of some kind with Open Office and donate it to a worthy (and tax deductible) charity or church group. We might want the machines to do more, but those orginaizations can certainly use them for word processing and spreadsheet management.

[bill]

Not a popular opinion, but I actually liked Vista. I had some serious hardware and a ton of RAM to run it on though. It was a lot more secure than XP. If it wasn't dog-slow on normal hardware I don't think it would have received the poor reputation that it garnered. Windows 7 was just a less hardware intensive version of Vista...with a few of the rough edges worked out.