Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 14th Mar 2008 21:52 UTC
"When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience."
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Member since:
2006-10-08
Learning time is always time well spent. :-)
That's correct, of course, I wouldn't do so, too. But remember: When you're interested in "reviving" older hardware, computer stores usually don't carry the parts you need. For example, my sound card is a cheap CMI thing for less than 10 Euro, works better than the built-in VIA AC'97 soundcrap. Money well invested. The good thing about PCI is: It's present from P1 class processors up to modern systems (which usually include built-in sound stuff). So instead of trying to figure out how to activate a strange nonstandard loadmyfirmwarefirst crap sound card, I'd buy a new one. If it's too complicated to get the sound card running, it's crap anyway. Nearly all good sound cards - even the old ones - are standard compliant or relatively easy to set up.
Similar here, P4 2.0 GHz, still with SDR-SDRAM (taken from the previous system) because I'm to mean to buy DDR-SDRAM. :-) I'll better change the complete system when (a) this one stops working or (b) this one does not fit my (futire) needs anymore. But actually, I don't see any reason to invest in IT infrastructure. Never change a running system that serves you perfectly. :-)
Another thing regarding buying things: Better buy something that's good for a long time than something that is considered "best" for a moment, revealing that it's crap after a few months. (Furthermore: The worst solution prevails.)
Running specific applications is a point for a good decision, I agree. You're using your system for productive reasons as it seems. What do most home users do? Listen to music, playing videos from the web, treat their PC like a typewriter. That's what they can do with a 300 MHz PC, too - granted that the respective software is installed. For example, LaTeX doesn't need tons of RAM, but produces better looking documents than (insert your favourite hate word processor here). :-)
Yes, I agree with that. It's just up to your individual feelings how much time you are willing to invest. Or, on the other hand, give up, that's possible, too. I would not invest time to get an older system running when I've not got a valid (!) reason to do so (e. g. no money, sufficient power for the particular job).