Hi, fatguy.
AFAIK, Ally's from the UK.....same as me. So; British English, I reckon.
32-bit P4? Yeah; that'll
run Tahrpup 6.05, all right, but that's about
all it will do. Your problem's gonna be that miniscule 256 MB RAM. You
can get stuff done with it, but you'll do quite a bit of 'swapping'.....
You
do have a swap file/partition set up, I trust? Tahr's recommended minimum is 512 MB, so.....
I've got a 15 yr old, 32-bit, Dell Inspiron 1100 lappie. Still going strong. Originally came with a Celly, 128 MB RAM, and a minute 20 GB HDD. After serious upgrading, it now sports a 'proper' P4, 2 GB RAM, and a 64 GB SSD. Plus a pair of SanDisk 128 GB 'Ultra Fit' nano USB drives as permanent 'external storage'.
Nowt wrong with the P4. That'll run forever. A bit more RAM would help, though; if you could make that up to a gig, you'd be laughing. There's not much call for DDR1 these days, so prices should be reasonable.....that's
if you can find any.
And although Intel developed and marketed the P4 on the basis of being good at multimedia stuff, that was back in the days when even video encoding was very much simpler than it is now. The 32-bit P4s are pretty rubbish with modern video, TBH, unless you set 'em to a very low frame-rate, etc. The later 64-bit versions added not only SSE3s, but usually hyper-threading, too.....made a single core behave like a dual. And as for streaming? Nah, forget it. They just don't have the 'grunt' to be able to process the stuff fast enough. Souleau's suggestion about downloading then playing back from the hard drive makes an
awful lot of sense with your specs.....
Mike.