it currently has vista on,and is a few years old,it has gotten slower....very slow,even he is fed up and complains every time he uses it.
so yesterday,had installed a virtual machine [virtualbox],the virtual box extension pack with drivers and whatnot and a distro called linux mint which is based on ubuntu and known by many as 'an ubuntu which just works' and is almost the most popular form of free linux.
had not known how bloated this distro was with software,it worked straight from the start with no config needed but fucking crawled along like a british athelete.
took ages to boot and shut down,there isnt any code or a splash screen to say its loading and the splash screen that shows when shutting is just a weird box of blocky text.
the default desktop environment is GNOME and even GNOME classic with no effects was slow.
so had installed the super awesome but light XFCE desktop environment-a improvement but its still laggy.
not recommending it to him as the one to permenantly install on his hard drive,cannot believe its recommended to people only just swapping over from windows-usualy because their pc cannot handle windows anymore,well fucking hell it aint going to handle linux mint.
today,had decided to try another distro out for him,see if it was any better for his spec.
so had tried one called puppy linux,its based on the ultra geek distro-slackware but with very little space and memory needed.
loved the speed and oldskool feel of it but coudnt get it to stick to the correct screen resolution of his monitor,think it needs the xorg file editing,but am back home now and cant sort that out till next week.
heres some screenshots of them both-
linux mint-the black window there is system settings-crashed due to the amount of lag its giving off.
puppy linux-there were areas of the screen that the mouse woud spaz out on due to the resolution being smaller than the VM window.