I recommend Kubuntu since KDE seems to work better on aging machines, at least in my experiences. Also it is slightly more similar to Windows – with the K menu, a single toolbar on the bottom of the screen and all that.

Good luck! I hope she likes it. :)

Hi everyone,

I took a big decision last week: I am going to make my girlfriend switch from Win XP (which works very bad on her aging machine) to Linux. For this, I began the unaddiction measures I read in some Linux mag: first, make her switch within Windows to only non-windows apps: Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin (which already considerably improved things for her, with a noticeable speed increase), Open Office, IZarc and a couple of other useful applications. In a couple of weeks, I will plug a second HD in the available IDE slot and install Ubuntu. She won’t really noticed the difference.

Yup, I tried it the other day on a spare machine and it worked amazingly well. I noticed that this is actually a great solution for working on a “borrowed” PC. There are 2 slow Windows boxen in the Adjunct office at my university. The IT re-images them once every 4 years or something like that. They are all really slow, and they have odd bits of spyware floating around (they run as Admin for some reason – probably so that professors can install more spyware as needed). I installed Wubi and now I have a clean and uncluttered OS running on one of them.

At any point I can just go into Windows Add/Remove dialog and uninstall it. Cleans up really well. Perfect for someone who wants to try messing around with Linux for a little while without really committing to it.

Now thats snazzy. I thought it was going to be something like andLinux (formerly coLinux) or a binary compatible version of cygwin. This is really slick though, I’ll have to try it out.