First off, sorry for the long post, feel a need to rant and also heap some praise.
Have spent the last few days exploring various Linux distro's in a end view to install on my living room multimedia PC. It runs Windows 7 x64, but since the meltdown and spectre debacle Windows updates have twice foobarred the OS, the first to a point where it wouldn't boot at all and the second time sent it haywire! Both times required a system restore to return it to a working state, and to tell it to ignore a couple of updates so they didn't install again.
It also happened at a most inconvenient time both times, first time was when I wanted to watch a video and second time when I booted it up to play some music while I got on with other things.
Hence deciding to put Linux on there on a second drive so I always have a choice to boot in to either OS, and I'm not left with a non bootable machine the next time I want to stick some music on to listen to.
It is a pretty old machine except for the case, I purchased a new ATX cube case to build it up in a couple years back, it does look quite nice. The motherboard is a Asus socket AM2 (I was given by a friend who had upgraded) fitted with a AMD Phenom 2.2Ghz quad core CPU (bought off eBay for £5) and 8Gb of Ram, the chipset is Nvidia Nforce 4, that proves how old it is. I also put my old AMD Radeon HD4870 in there along with a Asus Xonar D2X 7.1 PCI-E sound card.
The first distro I downloaded and tried was Manjaro, it installed no problem and everything worked, it also had access to all the latest software. BUT, I don't know what it was for sure but I didn't like it much, it's possibly because I installed the KDE version, I loved KDE back in the 3.xx days but not since. I just couldn't get a feel for it so I continued looking.
Second was SolydX, again everything worked but it felt quite slow and I moved on after 10 minutes.
I then downloaded and tried Gecko Linux. Well, better description would be tried to try Gecko Linux but it wouldn't even boot the ISO, just continually threw a kernel panic at the Grub boot menu so I moved on.
Grabbed MX-17 and gave it a try, everything worked but it has the most stupid task bar invented by man! Whoever came up with that idea needs to go to UI school, horrible. After faffing around trying to re-configure it for 5 minutes I concluded it would be quicker to download and try something else, so I did.
Next up was PCLinuxOS, everything worked and I know a lot of folk love it but I didn't! Spent half an hour with it but wasn't impressed so ditched it.
Next up was Bodhi Linux. I already have this installed on a PC I have in the bedroom, I have also used it for several years, since the Bodhi 2.0 days on various machines. I do like Bodhi and don't really have anything negative to say about it, but it's not suited to all tasks and I found this was one of them.
Finally I downloaded the 3.8 version of Linux Lite, (already have the 3.6 release but thought I'd grab the latest), and put that on there. Excellent! Everything worked as was expected and it reminded me why I choose Linux Lite in the first place. It just works, it's intuitive, it has sensible defaults, and it's a solid base to build upon and make what you want from it.
I still have to upgrade my main PC to 3.8, that's a job for later this week I think.
Great job guys, my living room multimedia PC is rocking and shaking the walls again!
Again, sorry about the long post just to say thanks. Another sleepless night and needed the distraction! 
