that’s good for testing if a device will work or not, but it’s terrible for judging how the OS performs. Mostly because your DVD/USB is going to be a serious bottleneck for I/O. Combine that with the 4GB of RAM and you’ve got some potentially crunchy performance ahead of you, which would not be indicative of the install performance.

If I were handed that hardware, the first thing I’d try is…

If what is currently being used is usable, and I don’t want to risk making it unusuable, shrink/resize the active partition with a partitioning tool. Then, assume I’m multibooting and I’d install on the secondary partition:

Raspberry Pi Desktop. I’d choose Pi OS because it is designed for an ultra low power 700MHz ARM11 that comes with the 2012 Pi 1. The drawback is it’s an older Debian install (Bullseye), but still getting long-term support until August. I assume they will release a new Desktop version when that date comes.

RetroPie. I’d grab the RetroPie script for ease of use on installing SNES emulation. It should prompt every emulator choice available for your system, and set up controller support (or keyboard+mouse) and emulationstation so you can browse your legally dumped roms after putting them in the correct directory.

uploading one at a time, uploading in smaller batches

Yup, that’s where I’d start. Creating a tar and splitting it into parts. Just as an example. Not sure if that guide is good or not. It was just the first thing that popped up in the search engine.

I wouldn’t use archive.is anymore. They tampered with the captures.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

The “we know better than you” attitude Microsoft has. They’ve very slowly removed more and more power user functionality. Almost every customization has to be hacked in with a group policy or registry edit now, or by outright replacing explorer.exe