Need some fast-and-dirty Windows XP to 7/8 advice.

My kids’ computer blew out yesterday, and the spare machine we have floating around is running Windows XP. Is there an easy way to get it up to something functional, like 7 or 8? – Bearing in mind that I’m not a computer dude, I’m not going to be a computer dude before about 3:30 PM, and I’ve already thought of the ‘give my kids my computer so I can get a new one’ wheeze.  I just upgraded this sucker in… huh. 2015.  I could have sworn it was last year.

Two years old, huh?

:pause:

…No! Bad Moe!  Focus!

Anyway, I could use a little feedback on this one.

13 thoughts on “Need some fast-and-dirty Windows XP to 7/8 advice.”

  1. Big problem is that MS just won’t sell 7 or 8 anymore, so most distributors are out of stock.

    So, how old is the wife’s machine? 😉

      1. Applied trickle-down economics in action, then. Growing up, we always enjoyed it when Dad upgraded, because then Mom got his old machine, and we got Mom’s old machine.

        1. The wife has nixed getting a new machine for herself. I am nixing having her machine get in the hands of my children, as I’d rather that they not learn how to take care of one by testing hers to destruction.

  2. I don’t know necessarily what your kids need to function but….

    Have you though of a Linux or BSD distribution?

    Ubuntu, for instance, is very easy to configure and obtain and probably does come with drivers that will run that old XP box. Since your kids are probably Windows oriented I would specifically go for the XUbuntu (http://xubuntu.org/) flavor which uses the XFCE windows manager which they would quickly adapt to and doesn’t require tons of resources to operate.

    Anyway just a thought.

    1. I think that going with a new operating system – or whatever one calls ‘using Linux’ 🙂 – is probably right out. On the other hand, upgrading my wife’s machine and giving the kids that is looking better and better. Apparently the spare machine only has a 64 gig hard drive.

  3. Well, the easy solution would be to bite the bullet and install Win10. Sadly there’s no upgrade path from XP to 7,8 or 10, so you’re looking at a fresh install.

  5. On the bright side, computers have become fairly cheap. I see new ones for around $200 all the time.
    .
    And I’m throwing virtual herring at you for even suggesting Windows 8 as a possible option.

  6. How old is the XP box? You may not *want* to try installing Win7 or newer on it, or it will suck (performance-wise). Particularly if it’s only got a 64 gig HDD – I’ll guess it doesn’t have 8 gig of RAM. I’ve seen Win7 wheeze on 4 gig of RAM, but even that isn’t much fun to use.

  7. New Egg has copies of Windows 7 for $139.99. The computer has to have a certain minimum level of performance for windows 10 to run on it otherwise it’ll crash and not be able to run Win10 again, that happened with my wife’s laptop. And Win10 doesn’t warn you about it. If the kids computer runs mostly games you want Win7 newer versions of Windows run a Win7 emulator to run games.

  8. Windows XP is faster and leaner than Windows 8. Never ran Windows 7 so I can’t say much about it. Why bother to change to a slower and fatter version of Windows? I suppose there are some programs out there that won’t run on XP, but I haven’t encountered them. The kid’s games ought to run on XP, no sweat.

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