OSNews

Sounds like a mean guy.

Tiny Core Linux is pretty IMO ... nice distro seems to work well.

Do you by any chance know how they do X in Tiny Core? Last I heard, they were using KDrive, which is hopelessly outdated and not compatible with lots of hardware, or so I thought. Or I guess Xvesa will technically run on just about anything...

EDIT: I remember my incompatibility gripes were about the keyboard and mouse functionality, which broke for some older hardware of mine after Nokia submitted certain patches upstream. Xvesa always worked on whatever display, though it was crazy slow.

Edited 2011-07-12 21:47 UTC

It's a extremely minimal build of X.org, I think. Essentially, it's Xvesa/Kdrive/smallX, just absorbed into the mainline X.org tree, and still maintained.

That is some serious OC. Props.

The whole K6 line was great for OC ( most dramatic performance improvement from overclocking, ever) , but that is still impressive.

It was the motherboard hard set limit, I was still running at 45C on load. I could have reach 700mhz easily and still run stable. Not bad from something machined with a wood drill and using a bunch of fish tank water pump. Those water blocks still work to this day.

Too bad high school geek look to be almost extinct. Those totally absurd challenge between us/them always end up with awesome result (and even more awesome catastrophic failures).

Your memory fails you (and rather early?). K6-2 certainly started above 200. With 300 to 400 being most likely / they seemed to be by far the most popular ranges IIRC (and Celerons of such ranges also had such overclocks)

550 was a standard top model; large part of slower ones were probably a silicon mostly capable of that speed but "factory underclocked", to fill the demand for mass-market chips; something which was and is a common practice (plus temperature isn't everything; MHz scaling is largely an architectural limitation; even K6-2+, which shifted to 180 nm process, wasn't capable of much above yours "easily and still run stable" ...which you can't know; nvm how "stability" has a very fluid meaning among pc hardware cargo cults)


Oh I'm so glad the kind you specifically refer to is almost extinct. Because there are plenty of HS geeks around, but today they seem to strive to do something with their computer (or with some fairly standard embedded board; or with almost run-of-the-mill robots) instead of superficialities (vs. building one in the style of, say, Galaksija) inside their computer.

That, and it's nice to be able to ask for (and readily get) an after-market cooler which is primarily as quiet as possible (one near which it would be easy to focus, one which won't get in the way of doing things with a computer) without getting the looks from salesmen like they have just seen an alien; without their surprised requests for clarification, without experiencing how hard the cogwheels inside of them are working when confronted with an entirely alien way of thinking about computers. And still getting IMHO grotesquely (vs. the requests) loud one, out of limited selection available (primarily targeted at "enthusiasts")

Exactly! I have never been a fan of projects meant to revive old computers because of that. The second reason is that I have never kept a computer for longer than 3 years. Else my house would look like a computer museum. 4 notebooks and 5 desktops since 2002.

So much for sustainability, I guess...

OK, but I have always sold them very cheap, so I suppose I have helped a few people.

Isn't Arch i686?

Well the originaly Pentium Pro should qualify as an i686 I guess it won't work for anything older then that, but my 486 cpu was hardly even able to run Windows 95 at the time.

The PPro was the original i686 architecture, aka P6. The P2, P3, Core, and Core2 CPU architectures are variations on the P6 core. The P4 was completely different.

I can second that. I tried DSL and then Arch Linux on an old Pentium II notebook. It had 128 MB of RAM. I had to buy a PCMCIA card for ethernet (€ 10 ;-)).

DSL did succeed to run, however it had some nasty quirks and, most importantly, the selection of applications is quite pure. After that quite joyless experience I decided not to give up the machine but instead try Arch.
With Arch Linux, I had really good performance, using fluxbox window manager with Nautilus as file browser, Epiphany as browser, Abiword for word processing. It ran really well. Web browsing was smooth and you could even listen to songs on Youtube. RAM usage was exceptionally low!

In conclusion, it was a nice experience to see that I can use my main operating system also in this special scenario. I thought that DSL would naturally be a better fit, but it had many shortcomings that Arch did not share. I did not perceive any disadvantage in using Arch.
Note that Arch Linux, however, will not run on the 486.

Edited 2011-07-12 11:27 UTC

Actually, you're not the only one who keeps wondering about that. Very old PCs might not support ACPI at all, and even if they did there is a high likelyhood that it's very barebones. And these old PCs eat huge amounts of energy even without any extra devices connected to them whereas you can get a light modern PC running fine with as little as 120W PSU.

So, if the old PC is actually used a lot wouldn't it be more cost-efficient to get a light, modern PC instead and save on the electricity bill itself?

What? I couldn't hear you over the whirr of the fans of my workstation, HTPC, server, and Xbox, while my car is running outside to get the airco going before I drive off to do some groceries down the street.

Good point, but this remains a true question. Even if an old computer consumes 3x as much power as a new computer, it may still cost more to recycle it and buy a new one than to make it run for a few more years.

If we count in energy, let's assume that a computer costs 1 GJ* to produce and 2 GJ to recycle. During its service, its average power consumption is 30W (counting the time during the year where it's shut down in the average). Now, 3 years after, we have a new computer, which has same production and recycling costs, but this time consumes 10W.

Keeping the old computer for 6 years : 9GJ
Changing computer after 3 years : 10GJ

The computer which consumes three times less power (which is pretty nice for three years of hardware evolution) loses, given sufficiently high production and recycling costs.

I'd love to see someone do this calculation with actual numbers from computer manufacturers.

---

* 1 GJ = 300 kWh, for those who prefer these units

Edited 2011-07-12 08:50 UTC

I don't know how applicable that is. After all, new PCs are crammed out anyways all the time, regardless of whether or not you're buying one. Should the energy spent on manufacturing one be counted on it? And is the energy spent the same for all PCs manufactured anyways? I honestly don't know.

The "PCs are produced anyway" argument is a bit of a perverse one. As weakly linked to each other as they are nowadays, offer is still supposed to follow demand to some extent. If people in large number tried to make their PCs last longer, we would produce less new PCs as a long-term result, since they would sell less.

As for the cost argument, however, I certainly agree that all computers are probably not equal from a production/recycling point of view. The question is, can we approximate these costs for all of them with a weighted average cost ? Or is this model not precise enough ?

As I said, someone with the proper data and good knowledge of statistics should work on this production/recycling cost problem. As it stands, we can argue all we want, but still cannot tell which of our intuitions is right. Your guess is as good as mine, as they say.

Edited 2011-07-12 11:37 UTC

Indeed, it would be really nice to see some actual, in-depth research on it. I simply do not have enough knowledge of these things to be able to make any meaningful estimations, I'm simply throwing questions in the air.

Another related issue is the method of disposal for abandoned electronics and the envionmental impact of that. How much winds up in landfills, and what is the procetag on PCBs leeching into the water supply? And who can forget the stories about "recycling" programs that involve burning electronic waste to reclaim valuable metals? What is the impact there?

There are many factors beyond actual power consumption from the wall from a "green" (uhgh!) perspective.

True economists turn this into numbers, declaring it's a loss of (natural) capital.

I have too much humanity left to do that job

@Neolander... Stay tuned. I've already written an article on this topic but it probably won't be posted for a couple months. Meanwhile, thank you for your many perceptive comments, from which I've learned a lot. -- Howard Fosdick

Edited 2011-07-12 20:36 UTC

If 1GJ = 300kWh then at 15c/kWh that is $45 for my rate. In China it would be way less but then we all pay for that in their CO2 and other.

And why is recycle 2x as much, the PCBs are likely (sadly) hand disassembled in Bangladesh or Chinese backyards. Most of the weight of PCs is plain steel, aluminum or plastic, recycling the bulk metal should be low.

A newer PC that is more integrated and has less components, comes in smaller package and retails for lower price almost certainly uses far less energy in manufacture and recycle as well as in use. So energy to manufacture is likely a near constant % of the manufacture cost (or they'd go broke). I'd hazard a guess that a $40 mobo for me has only $1 of energy and a few $ of labor cost in it. The chips and case probably same rates. The info is probably out there though.

After 3 years of use, it is reasonable to think about moving on. Just as incandescent bulbs are going the way of the dodo (by law in US and EU), perhaps most all energy clunkers should be retired since energy costs are going up as fast as PC energy use can go down.

I wish more PC stores would stock something like the tiny mini-box picoPSU that can plug directly into the mobo ATX connector. These are close to 95% efficient and can handle up to 150W and let you shrink a basic PC down to the size of the motherboard and a few cm thick.

I just replaced my wife's 140W 20" CRT with an 20" LED display, uses 14W, that will pay for itself every year. Shame that the CRT looks so much better for TV though and still could last many more years.

In the free download book "Without the hot air" by Prof David MacKay, there is a good analysis of energy costs for almost anything you can think of. Watts, calories, BTUs are really all equivalent. The market more or less can trade $.. for any of those within reason.

Depends on how long: you forget to take into account the energy spent to make the new PC.

The only problem with that last bit is that, for some people, amortization of cost is not a realistic option. For many, to keep a computer that they have already or can acquire cheaply and not spending, at minimum, several hundred dollars on a new computer makes a BIG difference to their bottom line.

Even in cases that are not so dire it may not be so attractive to spend a chunk of money today to save comparatively trivial amounts on the electric bill. Especially if they don't use the computer for much and the productivity gains to be expected are minimal.

In these cases, where productivity gains and long term financial savings are not a suitable carrot, what would be the motivator? We're back to the "green" arguments again, and as your discussion with Neolander is revealing, those are murky waters.

Finally, from the tinkerer perspective, it seems natural to make use of what you can find. Older, power hungry desktops are easily obtained. New, power efficient hardware, not so much. If I had to fork out bucks for every experimental idea that I wanted to mess around with I would give up the idea altogether. There is also a satisfaction (and dare I say beauty) that comes with taking something that already exists and repurposing it rather than destroying it.

You just reminded me of the long and drawn out discussions I used to have with my geek friends back in high school, regarding 486 vs Pentium. I was the poor kid with the 486 SX50 laptop with 8MB RAM, they all had Pentium desktops with 16MB or more, and were shocked that I could run Doom without lag just as they did. Of course that had little to do with number-crunching, something that their Pentiums would spank my 486 on, but all we ever did was play games and dial up to BBSes and Compuserve.

Man, I miss the 90s!

"Poor kid with a laptop" (even a rather slow one), in the 90s, doesn't seem to parse over here...

I didn't think I would have to elaborate, sorry. My estranged biological father bought a used laptop and mailed it to me in my senior year of high school, as a sort of "I'm still in your life, acknowledge me!" kind of thing. I have no idea how much he paid for it, but I felt extremely lucky to even have a computer at that time. I spent every dime of the money from my part time job upgrading that thing for the first few months I had it.

All my friends with their custom built PCs were from the wealthy side of the tracks, so it felt good even being in their league, regardless of the source. Plus I could fit it in my backpack and ride my bike to whichever friend's house was hosting the gaming sessions, since I was the only one who didn't have a car. Fun times!

No reason to be sorry, I figured it was probably some kind of handed down scenario.

It's just about slight comedic effect of seemingly somewhat contradictory "poor kid with a laptop in the 90s", particularly in the context of international forum ;p (for just one example: with my part of the woods - a fairly typical ex-Comecon country with shock of the 90s (but still one of more decent places to live), EU member a decade later - PCs in general can be hardly seen as a thing of the 90s; laptops, definitely only 2nd half of "noughties"; available part time jobs, a car, what are those? )

Must burn fossil fuels faster!!(?) ~3 million years of production burned every year is not fast enough!!(?)

(seriously, while getting a long use out of computers as computers is certainly worthwhile, digital picture frames in themselves seem like icons of few things wrong with us; hey, fitting they usually show... us ;p )

No one said you have to use a crt with the 486. I don't even know anyone who still has one.

You have no choice. Most 486 computers had only 1-4MB of video ram (with a VESA/ISA video card slot). They cannot support anything except a low resolution CRT (if you can even find one that works).

Nonsense. It does not require more video memory to plug in a relatively modern LCD via a standard VGA port and run it at 640x480. Yes it's below the optimal resolution for the device, but if power consumption is your goal I doubt you care.

Yeah right.

So what's the probability that someone who is so poor that they are still using a 1991-1994 vintage computer just happens to have a spare LCD monitor and VGA adaptor cable lying around?

Close to zero.

It is hard to even find a working CRT monitor. I haven't seen one for sale for at least three years.

I still have two, taking up space in my office floor right now. They are my standbys in case my LCD goes south.

As for whether you can use an LCD on an old computer, sure you can! If your LCD accepts a VGA input (and most still do), it can scale down to 640x480.

They don't get thrown away. They get sold in lots and get bought by importers from third world countries like mine. P4s are sold for between 50 and a 100 USD here. Most people can't afford newer systems so these old ones sell like hot cakes. Even servers with power hungry netburst architecture dual xeon chips are sold here. All brought down from the west. Trash yes. Useless no.

Also you are wrong about p4s not being powerful enough. P4s have about as much power as netbooks running atom CPUs and we know how popular those are.

I agree. Even if I have nothing less powerful than a Core 2 Duo T8300 (a notebook, which I am going to sell very cheap) P4s should be powerful enough to run almost every OS, including Windows 7. In the Western World we are spoiled, myself included.

In Australia most people buy white boxes with cheap noisy power supplies. They normally throw them out when the power supplies die after 4-5 years. The labour costs are far too high to repair or recycle them.



I actually said that 486s aren't powerful enough.

P4s are quite powerful but they are hot, noisy and very inefficient - especially when combined with a CRT monitor.

The same could be said of Haiku OS (and on a personal note, with none of the strangeness of AmigaOS.)

I've had it running on a couple of P3-800 with 512MiB of RAM with no issues for half-a-year or so.

Lucky! My old hardware all died. I tried picking up a mobo with dual PIIs on ebay but it was DOA.

Agreed. I like the author's idea of fun with older systems, kind of like a hobbyists viewpoint. From a larger scale viewpoint like you express it's not practical.

It's so old and niche that it is not targeted. Firefox 2 could be an easy attack vector, but beside that, I don't think. Security issues come and go. Some -are- there since decades, but it's more likely that they are only a few years old.