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Dell Optiplex GX240

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KenEG

Experienced Member
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Oct 20, 2016
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440
Location
Cincinnati, Ohio USA
This isn’t quite vintage, but I bought this computer cheap from eBay last week. It needed a power supply and the CPU cooling fan was missing. After buying and installing them, it works great. The XP Pro install was invalid, so I installed using one of my activation keys. It wouldn’t activate over the internet. I called Microsoft not expecting much. They gave me a code to activate it and it worked great. Very pleasantly surprised. The install CD I used has service pack 3 and I installed IE 8. Any other updates I can do? Antivirus? It has USB ports and a DVD drive so I use my Win 10 PC to download and keep this off the net.
 
Download the New Moon 32-bit web browser.https://msfn.org/board/topic/177125-my-build-of-new-moon-temp-name-aka-pale-moon-for-xp/ . It'll be far better than IE 8. If you are not going to connect it to the internet you shouldn't need an AV because your Windows 10 should be checking anything you download.

This is a good read https://www.theguardian.com/technol...windows-xp-safely-now-its-no-longer-supported

I've got a G240 as well it runs Duvean Linux quite well, Its got one gig of ram. You might want to use a live Linux distro if you want to do any web stuff. You can use that to directly download stuff for XP if you're keen to do that.
 

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You can. I'd recommend giving a live distro like ChrunchBang a shot just to get the feel of it. http://www.crunchbang.linuxfreedom.com/download.html its older but will run quite well. It was my daily driver for many years. It detected all my hardware including wireless.

Nice tutorial https://www.howtogeek.com/214571/how-to-dual-boot-linux-on-your-pc/

How big is the hdd? You'll need to partition the hdd if you want to dual boot. Gparted is a good tool for resizing the various partitions, much like old partition magic, https://gparted.org/livecd.php Its a bootable cd. Some screen shots https://gparted.org/screenshots.php Basicly you'll need to resize the XP partition (see below) seeing as there isn't enough room in the system for a second hdd. Create two partitions for linux. A ext3 and a swap partition. A half a gig will do for the swap partition.

To resize NTFS in XP log in as Administrator click the Windows "Start" button and click "Control Panel." Click "Administrative Tools" and then double-click "Computer Management." In the opened window, select "Disk Management" to view your hard drive configurations.

Right-click the NTFS disk partition you want to change and select "Resize." This opens a new dialog box where you set the size of the partition.

Enter a new size in the text box labeled "Partition size." This value is entered in megabytes (MB). Therefore, if you want to size it as 2 gigabytes (GB), enter "2000" into the text box.

Click "OK" to save your settings. If prompted to restart, click the "Restart" button to reboot your machine for the settings to take effect.

Stumbled apon this partitioning tool https://www.disk-partition.com/download-home.html It works in XP :)
 
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I looked at Pale Moon, but it doesn’t seem to support XP anymore. I may try again and see if I can download an older version. I did make some progress with XP itself tonight. I turned on automatic updates and it installed an update. Then manual update started working. I am slowly updating XP as far as I can. There is also a catalog on the Microsoft site with some newer updates. Some as new as 2017. I did download goggle Chrome. It seems to be working better than IE 8.

I may install Linex someday, but not yet. I will probably install on one of my laptops first to try it out.
 
New Moon in the link I provided above is what you should be installing. There is also Chromium browser which is Chrome without the fluff.
 
OK, Thanks for the clarification. I just searched for "pale moon browser" and followed the link that came up. I will use your link as that does look like what I want. I may try Chromium also. Chrome did let me go to the dell site and download the BIOS update, but it gave me some security warnings. I ignored them because I think Dell is pretty safe.

Caluser2000 said:
New Moon in the link I provided above is what you should be installing. There is also Chromium browser which is Chrome without the fluff.
Click to expand...
 
OK, Thanks for the clarification. I just searched for "pale moon browser" and followed the link that came up. I will use your link as that does look like what I want. I may try Chromium also. Chrome did let me go to the dell site and download the BIOS update, but it gave me some security warnings. I ignored them because I think Dell is pretty safe.

Caluser2000 said:
New Moon in the link I provided above is what you should be installing. There is also Chromium browser which is Chrome without the fluff.
Click to expand...
 
You're welcome. Yeah browsers seem to go over the top these days with warnings for totally safe sites. Firefox ESR is like that Pale Moon less so.
 
I got all of the updates installed today and the installed Pale Moon. It seems to work much better than IE 8 or Chome. I also installed the free version of Avast antivirus. Don’t plan to spend much time on the web, but since it is connected, I though I should protect it. I removed a lot of things I don’t plan to use from Windows, mail, messaging, etc. and then the parts of Avast that pertains to them. I plan to mostly play old games on it and maybe try some programming.
 
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