I was thinking on installing houdini on my old machine, for very simple practising.
Im not sure will it run though. First time it said it couldnt run correctly, so now i reinstalled ms visual C++ packages, just in case.
I looked the system req sheet, but there are some tehnical in deepth meanings of hardware because of which i am unable to determine if it can be run, so here are my specs:

64bit system
DDR2 4 GB
IntelCore 2 QUAD CPU Q9550 2.83 GHz (4 CPUs)
Nvidia GeForce GT 610 (Approx. Total Memory 2770MB) (DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC)

A quick search shows that the Q9550 is over 10 years old. Houdini 17.0 requires SSE 4.2 instructions, and it seems like your CPU is too old to have SSE 4.2. If the error message during installation says “Your CPU does not appear to support SSE 4.2.”, then your CPU is too old to run Houdini 17.0.

You may be able to install an older version of Houdini (e.g. Houdini 16.5) on your machine. However, 4GB RAM and 4 CPU cores at 2.83 GHz means that it will be slow, and may be unable to process more complex scenes.

Are there any other versions that Don't require SSE 4.2 that are still available for download now?