welp now i'm a part of the CIA

Windows Vista an & are insecure but you can install an anti virus like malwarebytes.

Still being insecure because their kernels had exploits that can bypass any antimalware protection.

If such an exploit was discovered then Microsoft would immediately patch it. Just look at wannacry.

@Jokey_Carrot That is an exception rather than a rule, don't expect just because they patched an EOL version of Windows once that they'll ever do it again.

honesty I'd rather have a laptop that runs decently but with a few vulnerabilities than one which can't detect half of it's own components and lags all the time... also with win and vista, just get malwatebytes, if you don't do anything stupid like download sketchy stuff or visit dodgy websites you should be fine.

Put Win 8.1 on it, better compat than 7 and lighter than 10

in terms of speed & feel of the OS, i also recommend to go to a super lightweight linux distro. there are some that still look awesome while having almost no requirements.
Though as Vilagamer already said, you might be better off putting the OS on it that came with the system, because you will probably be able to get everything working (touch driver and what not).

If i was you, id start by creating USB sticks for windows 7, 10 and 11, aswell as live usb sticks for some linux/unix distros and just try out how it feels. make sure you take a look at idle system usage. If its low, your computer will have more resources left to do other operations. And you shouldnt worry about vulnerabilities too much. No one wants to hack you and if you dont download sketchy shit or click on every ad you see, you will be fine even without installing any anti virus program - which btw just slow your laptop down even more because of constantly reading shit from your storage. From windows 10 on, windows defender is good enough anyway.

As far as upgrades go, usually after an SSD swap in laptops, the only thing thats left is the RAM. My guess is the laptop has 4 GB slow af ram. if you are able to swap it out for 8gb more recent ram, you will likely see a huge benefit in every day usage. especially paired with an ssd and an optimized OS, you can squeeze a lot (for general usage again) out of older hardware.

Check if the bios allows for some overclocking, you could got a little bit out of that too.

I'd recommend debian or opensuse as they support 32bit systems.

Also the cpu may be socketed and upgradable but the graphics chip only has xpdm drivers which means 3d acceleration won't work on anything newer than vista.

given this laptop's specification sheet, Windows is probably not your best option, as a 1.2 ghz dual core and 2 gb of ram is just barely enough for a 64 bit version of windows Although i don't think there was a 64 bit version of the intel GMA950 graphics drivers, now i've played with linux on all kinds of hardware and honestly i think the only thing that there woudn't be a driver for out of the box is the wifi, but that can be fixed easily, i know people are saying "put windows on it" but intel's support of their hardware is a crapshoot at best.

anyway @1B51004, all discussions aside both linux and windows can be good options, just make sure to try them out first and see which one preforms the best. Also try searching online if your pc can be upgraded with better ram and a faster hdd or an ssd, as @slluxx said you will definitely see the improvement.

UPDATE: Got a 500GB hard drive. managed to get it wiped, so ill try Lubuntu. Currently looking into upgrading (or seeing if it can be upgraded).

*installs you onto my 3DS*

Is that Sun or Moon though? I think the ID is one of the Ultra versions.

Holy shit, a Panasonic Toughbook. Things are almost indestructible.

Is that what that thing is? It's hard to tell from the blurry picture.

Update 2: Running into some problems. Two errors show up even before the USB I tried to load in is activated.
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F:Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM.
From what I've been looking up, it seems to be related to either an user error in the BIOS boot settings or a failure in the hard drive. I'm hoping its not the hard drive, but we shall see what happens.

PXE is network boot, so that error shouldn't matter. Maybe it's set to boot off a PXE server by default and fails since it can't find it but you can just turn PXE off.

PXE is when the computer tries to boot via network, there should be a Network Boot option in the bios, usually under boot options, disabling that should get rid of that error.

Yeah, that seem to have fixed the problem.

man i should not be qualified to work with computers if it was that simple to fix