I’ve got a couple of older Dell core2 machines with ddr2. They still have good caps in them. They’re interesting to me because they have 3.5" floppy and sata cd/DVD and they can handle a newer os. Id like to keep something around that I can pop in an old cd/DVD or floppy disk or create disks from. I’m just stuck on if I should install xp, 7, 10, tiny 10, some flavor of Linux, they have vista stickers on them. They’re just in a weird spot where they’re not really vintage PC’s and not really modern anymore either.
I’d stick with XP. Most software written for windows 95 and up will run on XP, and it’s still new enough to connect to modernism file shares to download files. There’s a ton of games and hardware that works best with XP.
As soon as you install Linux on a machine like that it becomes just an old boring PC.