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I have bee months trying to revive a PC that is so old, people that I told about it just say to junk it. But I believe that there is a Linux OS out there that can help me out. The Type of PC that I'm trying to Revive is a 2001 Gateway Desktop with an Intel Pentium 4 processor. The Processing speed is 1.50Gz, and the System Bus Speed is 400MHz. The Cache RAM is 256KB and the total Memory with a friend's Driver that I installed on it is 512MB but 256MB with the one it came with. It also runs on Windows xp but the OS is messed up. Its so slow that I booted up Lubuntu up there once (and that was my only time), and it was lagging a lot. I tested on my laptop (HP AMD Turion 64x2 with 2GB RAM), and it worked perfectly. Ubuntu or any OS Linux can I install on my computer?

Braiam
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Mr.Biggs360
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    Sounds like a hard disk drive failure. Have you tried replacing the HDD? I have several computers like that (generic all), and they are working pretty fine with Ubuntu 9.04, 10.04, 11.04 and they even boot with 12.04 (laggy). Maybe you can try a lightweight desktop environment like those proposed by other users as answers here but first make sure the HDD is working correctly. (Remember that some times the HDD is OK but the cable is messed up, do the proper testing before attempting to install.) Good luck! – Geppettvs D'Constanzo May 09 '13 at 22:21
  • Hello, I had a ancient netbook like 95 or something and it only has 2gb HDD (sd card) drive. Well lot of hard searching finally i found Puppy Linux. It manage to detect all hardware corectly and run flawlessly. By Flawlessly I mean really fast. – Shaharil Ahmad May 10 '13 at 08:08

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You can try Xubuntu - is perfect for those who want the most out of their desktops, laptops and netbooks with a modern look and enough features for efficient, daily usage. It works well on older hardware.

Xubuntu

Or, better, Lubuntu - is targeted at PC and laptop users running on low-spec hardware that, in most cases, just don't have enough resources for all the bells and whistles of the "full-featured" mainstream distributions.

Lubuntu

Radu Rădeanu
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You can try Lubuntu, which is simmialr to Xubuntu, but uses LXDE instead.

Seth
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BeryJu
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I'd say replace the hard drive with a small SSD, and then run any flavor of Ubuntu you like. 1 GB of RAM and 1.5 GHz is MIGHTY thin, but the bottleneck of any general purpose computer is the hard drive. Any *buntu offering over 10.x will be a little laggy, but not overly so. You might even re-install Windows XP, which should perform quite well.

Malf
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    Whereas adding an SSD to the system would likely increase performance, in this case it isn't the best option. Older motherboards don't have support for SATA 3 which means the SSD is unlikely to run at its maximum transfer rate and it may not even support AHCI will could also affect performance. But the biggest reason it isn't a good idea is that a cheap AM1 or J1900 SOC system with CPU,MOBO,RAM costs pretty much the same as a decent 240GB SSD and would be a better investment than using a P4 with an SSD. – Michael Lindman Aug 15 '16 at 20:47