DebianDog - Wheezy

[sindi]

2008 Compaq SR5000 series desktop with Vista, which refuses to update itself or Defender, and won't install Firefox or irfanview, both apparently common problems with Vista. Last updated in 2009. Requested for a free language lab with Windows, to teach English to Arabic speakers in Detroit. I spent much of 24 hours attempting to get Vista to behave and Micro* to install.

MicroXP would not even start to install. Blue screen, something about a library. Micro2003 (which installed to a 2004 HP server when MicroXP did not) loaded tons of scsi and raid drivers and booted to a black screen with i-diacritic, ; and a green Yen sign.

Vista will not run DOS games. Cannot do full screen.

specs:
nvidia Geforce 6510SE
Realtek ALC88 audio
2.7GHz AMD 1GB RAM.
Sold with Works and trial Office 2007.

Tahr cannot handle the nvidia video. X would work but then the browser or a terminal would crash with a sort-of blank screen. Different behavior than my 2007 HP dv6500 (where X displays in three parallel scrambled copies) but equally unusable. I tried the nvidia updated driver for AMD non-PAE but it would not install.

Lupu2016 video works just great but lupu won't run recent browsers and ebay won't work with the old Pale Moon.

DebianDog Jessie 2015 works out of the box with generic nouveau driver. No fbcon, and X is a bit squished sideways on a non widescreen monitor, but the rest works perfectly. I added Palemoon 28.5, and youtube-viewer (set to 720p). It also automatically sets up ethernet connection, easier on beginners.

I found ROX and made links to gtk-youtube-viewer and palemoon on the screen, as well as in the jwm menu.

The person setting up the language lab will offer it to someone with home internet since I have no linux-capable wifi cards to share. Or it may go to a household that we send food pantry surplus to in another poor area of SE Michigan. I will save changes.dat for quicker setup of our other ten old desktops.

No problems with updates or Alt-F1 not working. 'New' hardware.
Thanks again for everyone's help.