Carl Sorensen <[email protected]> writes: > What kind of specifications would you like in a replacement machine? My > university is having a surplus sale on Wednesday at which I can get used > machines very inexpensively.
Well, my current laptop is a T61 Thinkpad, as was the one I have now delegated to spare part collection. It has an Intel Core2 Duo at 1800MHz (the other one had 2000MHz but I preferred not moving the CPU over in case it was involved in some manner with the graphics failure). I have 4GB of RAM and am now back to an Intel onboard GPU. Which is _great_ to have in order to have full support of hibernate and suspend under GNU/Linux (I haven't bothered with Windows partitions for the last decade) and no end-of-line of support for binary-only drivers like NVidia or similar. The current resolution is 1280x800, the one that had died terminally was 1400x960 or so. I would not want to go for much lower. It has a Cardbus slot which I need to keep my audio hardware working. I am partly using 64bit binaries these days for debugging etc so I would not want to go back in that respect. It has a SATA slot which is occupied currently with a 120GB SMD drive. Obviously, this would just get moved to a successor. Every single laptop of mine died of use or was in such terrible mechanical shape that it would not have made sense to sell it. Keyboards break down, screen hinges, I am afraid a no-name one ultimately died by tea (the newer Thinkpads are pretty resilient in that respect). So there is not a lot of sense in originally cheap hardware: it makes more sense to buy something with more modest specs and a few years older but with a track record of being rugged _and_ reasonably well-sold (which improves the chance for good continued GNU/Linux support). Basically, I don't think I am all that bad off at the moment but there is not much of a reserve right now. I don't have GPU/motherboard as a backup, I don't have a backup keyboard (I don't actually mind what's printed on the keys since I am typing U.S. anyway. I tend to buy keyboards which have been turned "German" with stickers so that I can just pick them off and get a U.S. keyboard but my current keyboard happens to be Belgique or Swiss French on its bottom layer so I stopped peeling after the first key). I don't have a backup fan unit, the only backup disk I have is rotary, the battery is down to 40% of its capacity (bought a year ago) and so on. If there was some replacement T61 with possibly somewhat nicer specs (apart from me definitely preferring the rather low-spec Intel GPUs) that would just ensure continuity in operation. More substantial boosts mean less redundancy in hardware overall, and I cannot reasonably go back before SATA interfaces since I don't have convincingly working pre-SATA drives with sufficient capacity. > Both laptops and desktops are available; desktops are generally less > expensive per unit of computing power. Most of the desktops are > likely to be small-form-factor machines, rather than towers. I don't really work with/on desktops any more: too cumbersome to drag around. > I'm willing to shop for one and see if there's something suitable > available. Please let me know of your preferences. Mostly "robust" and "generic parts" and not too much of a stepdown from what I currently have. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
