Expiration Date

[borgward]

After fooling around with a Dell Dimension 4550, and a Dell Optiplex 210L, I am wondering how soon I will not be able to run a current and up to date Linux Distro such as Ubuntu, Mint,or Fedora on it. I could probably run Puppy or DSL, but I find them to be an option of last resort. I am currently running a Dell Inspiron 1520 Pentium Dual Core in it. LinuxMint 17 Cinnamon LTS. Pretty much does anything I need to do such as browser with many tabs open and YouTube. Plays DVD's quite well. I may consider more RAM or a Dual Core Duo upgrade If that's compatible with my chipset and BIOS ver, but not if the laptop will be antiquated in the near future.

[dXTC]

I have a feeling your Inspiron will be powerful enough for the next major Mint Cinnamon version, judging from its specs.

You can always switch to the XFCE version if Cinnamon becomes too much for your machine in the future. I'm running the current version of Mint XFCE on an old Atom-based Lenovo netbook that's considerably weaker than yours, and the only thing that really bogs it down is Flash-based websites. It runs OpenArena and Stella without so much as a hiccup.

[MtnDewManiac]

After fooling around with a Dell Dimension 4550, and a Dell Optiplex 210L, I am wondering how soon I will not be able to run a current and up to date Linux Distro such as Ubuntu, Mint,or Fedora on it.

Until it (Mint 14, not the laptop) "expired," I ran Mint 14 Xfce on an old laptop with... 768 megs of ram and a single-core, single-speed P4 that produced so much heat that its three fans often seemed to produce as much noise as a jetliner on a takeoff roll. Last laptop I've touched that had a decent keyboard, lol. I'd probably be running Mint 17.1 Xfce on it, but I was gifted this i5 laptop by a good friend and figured I might as well use it. The P4 did some things slower than I might have wished, but still far and away faster than I could have done them with a pencil and piece of paper. It's all relative, yeah?

I would guess that the answer to your question is: "Until you reach the point where you choose not to use hardware that performs tasks slower than newer hardware, or until you decide that you want a/some feature(s) that is/are only available on newer hardware."

Regards,
MDM

[RacerBG]

Except Puppy and DSL you can try also TinyCore, antiX, CrunchBang++ and ArchBang just to name a few. For example I have a stone age PC from 2005 (last upgrade - 2007) which have 3 GB RAM, P4 2 GHz single core CPU, ATI Radeon X1200 integrated memory and 80 GB HDD. Guess what? I'm running Debian Jessie with KDE 4.14.2 and I can turn on all effects, and still I can run it fine while watching YouTube videos or working in Libre Office.

[Fred Barclay]

On RacerBG's train of thought, I've got a Hp s7410n machine (2005 era as well) with 1 GB RAM, 1.70GHz processor, and 250GB Seagate HDD, and it runs Debian Jessie or Sid MATE perfectly well, as well as Arch MATE or Kali Gnome Classic (or whatever they call the Gnome-3-almost-trying-to-look-like-Gnome-2-desktop-thing now). It also ran the old LMDE Cinnamon quite decently, but Betsy Cinnamon is a bit too much for it. Betsy MATE is slower on the bootup and login than Sid MATE ( about 45 seconds BU and another 30 seconds LI, as opposed to 20 and 15 on Sid), but once it's up, it does quite well unless I'm updating or installing something from terminal and have a browser running.
So you should be fine. Really, the best judge will be yourself. Every machine is different, so it's a good idea to try different distros until you find one you like.

All the best!