Old PC, migrating to Mint. Can I have a sanity check on components?

[DigiMay]

Greetings!

I'm planning on migrating my grandpa's computer to Linux Mint. We've been maintaining it since 2010, so it's not fast, but it's very reliable. Plus, it handles his modest needs and he doesn't want to put much money into what for him is mostly about accessing emails/spreadsheets and running Autocad 14 (a DOS program) via Virtualbox with WinXP.

As it currently runs Windows 10 x64 with no real issues (just slowly), I figure Mint Cinnamon will run fine, but I wanted to run the specs by the forums to see if anything jumps out as obviously problematic before I migrate him over.

Specs:
Athlon II x260 (3.2ghz 2c2t)
8GB DDR3-1600
MSI 880GM-​P51 AM3 board
250GB SATA SSD + old windows drive for backup
Radeon HD 5450, VGA monitor 1024x768
Intel AX201 Wifi PCIe card (planned, as I have one spare)
Actual, internal 3.5" Floppy via header on the motherboard

One other question - I assume Linux can read Windows/FAT floppy disks from a real internal floppy drive? He still has a few files on 3.5" disks he'd like to be able to read.

Thanks again!

[AZgl1800]

You don't say what desktop environment he was using before.

with a ten year old machine, putting Cinnamon on it will slow it way down, compared to using XCFE or MATE.

I like Cinnamon, and installed it on a 20 year old Gateway desktop PC that still has the OEM spinning HDD in it.... it is so slow, it makes me think it is still running MS Windows, so slow in fact, that I don't enjoy using it...

so I don't very much, it is in my old office room, I now use laptops from my Recliner, the newest is about 4 years old with a very speedy CPU and 16gb of RAM, it has never slowed down enough for me to detect a "slowness problem"

With your gpa's pc, I think you will need to replace the spinner with a SSD, and try to max out the RAM as much as possible.

EDIT:
pretty sure, Linux can read the old 3.5" floppy disks, I know it can read FAT and exFAT on internal drives on my older laptops.

[DigiMay]

He's in Windows 10 right now, and it's unbearable, at least for me. We originally built this thing using windows 7. So the desktop environment would be 'windows'.

He's absolutely getting an SSD for boot. I'm planning on leaving the old windows disk intact just for backup sake. I have a 250G Samsung for this.

I don't have the spare DDR3 right now to max out the RAM, but 8 GB doesn't seem horrible considering it does run Win 10 and that's a hog. If I need to I can source another 8g somewhere.

And finally, that's what I figured about the floppies, Linux seems to be able to do just about everything I'll try it and find out for sure.

[Peter Linu]

There is no sanity clause.