On Fri, 2010-07-30 at 17:42 -0400, Ed Nisley wrote: > > trying to set up an old PC (10 or 12 year old Compaq > > [opinion] > > Kick that junker to the curb and get something from the > current millennium. > > Having futzed with several PCs from that era, it simply > isn't worth the aggravation of trying to ram a contemporary > distro into not enough RAM with not enough CPU, then keep it > running with no connectivity. > > For the price of three or four tanks of gas, get a perfectly > serviceable netbook / low-end desktop / off-lease Dell that > won't have any of those problems. > > Yeah, as an intellectual exercise, you can use an old > junker, but *why* take on that much aggravation? > > Oh, and the new box will come with Windows, which solves all > the compatibility problems, too... > > [/opinion] >
My experience has been quite different. My primary and secondary desktop PCs are year 2000 Dells. (You MHVLUG guys with Smartphones can smirk. Your smartphone has more compute power than my desktop). My primary desktop PC is a year 2000 Dell Dimension 4100. PIII 733 MHz. 512 MB RAM. HDD1= 10 GB. HDD2= 100 GB. It triple boots Fedora 13, Ubuntu 10.04, and Win XP Pro. All three OSes run great. (I'm a non-poweruser). I've had close to zero aggravation. My only regret is that my specs are inadequate for VirtualBox. The 4100 originally only had 128 MB RAM. Fedora ran agonizingly slow. After I upgraded to 512 MB, performance is completely satisfactory. (OP writes that his dad's Compaq has 0.5 GB) The 4100 did not come with a DVD drive, but it had a spare external drive bay. I added a DVD/RW drive. OP might want to add a DVD drive to the Compaq so he can install Linux distro DVDs. I ran Fedora for a year with dial-up-only Internet access. Updates to KDE and OpenOffice ran in the tens of megabytes and were really unpleasant on dial-up. I frequently took a USB stick to a public library and downloaded the updates on their high-speed connection. (Fedora 13 now has a delta-RPMs function which is intended to greatly cut down on the size of updates.) OP might want to consider using a lighter weight desktop such as Xfce and omitting OpenOffice. My secondary desktop PC is a year 2000 Dell Dimension L. Celeron 566 MHz. 192 MB RAM. HDD= 80 GB (upgraded from 10 GB). It runs Xubuntu 10.04. Performance on this PC is lethargic. But I use the PC mainly for backups, in lieu of an external HDD. _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Aug 4 - Samba Sep 1 - BOINC Oct 6 - Creating Firefox Extensions
