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I have an older Compaq 300m laptop, it is currently running W2k SP 4, I have been thinking of upgrading it to XP. I am just not sure if there are any benefits to doing this on an older piece of hardware. Can anyone offer some opinions?

Specs:
PIII 600mhz CPU
192 MB of ram
10 gig HD
Windows 2000 SP4.

It'll run slow - I have a similar machine at home with ~500MG of RAM and a 6 GB drive that still runs Windows 98 - it's blazing fast compared to my XP machine.

The ram will hurt it more than the processor will. XP needs at least 256mb to run smoothly, though the main reason to upgrade is if there's software you use that won't run on anything but XP. Otherwise stick with 2k.

Technically IMO there is no benefit at all to upgrading to XP, unless you want to play certain really recent games or use Office 2007, or if you want to be able to detach a debugger from a running process without killing said process. You wouldn't want to use old hardware for the former, and you probably have no need to do the latter, thus, I'd leave it.

The OP computer will run quite acceptably with XP. For a long time, I used a P2 400 with 128mb as a backup computer and for normal use (everything but 3D games) it was totally fine. Don't open too much at once and there won't be any problems. Prior to loading XP, it ran 2k, and switching to XP with themes and such disabled actually improved the speed.

It should run fairly well if you turn off the theming service (my sister has a laptop with a P3/650 and 320MB of RAM). XP also has better laptop support.

If you want to have a Linux box to mess with, you could throw Xubuntu on it and see how well it works.

My old K6II 366mhz ran XP just fine for office work and light browsing. I did bump up its RAM to 256mb though.