It's been over 7 months since I powered it up (hence literally hours of updates and stuff; tried a new cleaner tool called privazer which I saw on Betanews the other day and it cleared up nearly 8Gs of HD space and that's saying something for a 32G HD. lol

Still have GIMP 2.4 on this sytem and have no plans on upgrading since I never plan on doing anything on this laptop (lots of data though so keeping it around). Dell made some great laptops in the day. Still runs pretty well for a 1GByte RAM system with single processor at 2.4GHz.

You could load up Linux on a thumb drive (persistent mode) and have access to the latest version of GIMP, as well as have access to your Windows data from within Linux. That laptop is plenty powerful enough. It should run pretty fast with a lightweight Desktop, like LXDE and/or MATE.

You should breath some new life back into that senior.

Back on my Win7 machine (and my XP VM; lol). Yeah; could, but again, my laptop has a lot of data that I'm using as a second backup (also on external HD) and you and me both know it's not a backup unless you have 2.

Lots of data on an aging hard disk... Copy it to an external hard disk that you can use on another PC.

I do have it on external drive as well ofnuts; if my laptop should die, I can then get another external HD to back the external drive up.

Just go ahead and archive the data off to DVD, reformat the the drive and load 'er up with a clean install of Fedora 19 LDXE + MATE.

Well, that's I would do.

You could get several more years of useful life out of the unit.