On 28/07/16 01:50 PM, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
Interesting. And encouraging. Maybe I can hold out a while longer, and keep using dial-up with the new Linux PC, postponing the extra expense of DSL versus dial-up. I pay today $15 / mo. (+taxes) for dial-up access. My ISP (Start.ca) wants $40 / mo. (plus taxes) for 5 Mbs DSL service.
If you are spending $15 per month on dial-up Internet, you are also spending something for your hard line. I was spending $60 per month my hard line until I realized everyone in my home had cell phones and had made the hard line superfluous. Your hard line plus the dial-up service probably will not cost appreciably more and may end up costing less than a DSL or cable Internet service. You will also have a much better user experience with that compared to dial-up.
Your stated goal of comparing the dial-up experience on XP to Linux is really pointless unless you run the test on the same hardware hitting the same host at the same time. Of course a 12 year old machine with a crufty Windows XP installation running a browser that does not support modern web standards is going to be slower than a modern machine running any modern operating system running any modern browser. It seems like a lot of bother to prove something of little consequence.
If one of your concerns in sticking with dial-up is that you still want the XP machine to have Internet access, you could add a second network card to your new machine and have it act as a router/firewall/gateway for the XP machine, which is for the best anyway given that XP no longer gets security updates.
You may be able to convert your Outlook mail to Thunderbird following this article. <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files> Once you have converted, set up an IMAP server on the new Linux machine and store your mail in IMAP format.
I do not remember when Microsoft switched to the .docx and .xlsx formats. If the default file extension in Office 2003 is .doc and .xls, it should be quite painless to convert those files to Libre/OpenOffice. The newer file formats are a bit trickier but it usually works without any problems because most people do not use features of Word or Excel that causes problems. I have only run into issues with heavily formatted documents and with Excel macros.
I have built many systems since the late '80s. I have never bought a case that did not come with all the hardware I needed and I have never had a system not boot the first time I turned it on. The machine on which I am typing this, I assembled from components in Sep. 2009. I have since upgraded various components and I will probably assemble another machine this fall. If you can assemble IKEA furniture, you can assemble a PC.
It sounds like you may want to experiment with different distributions. If so, you should consider going straight to 32GB of RAM for the nominal price difference over the lifespan of the machine so that you can play around with different distributions running in virtual machines. You can get by with 16GB of RAM but if your motherboard has only two DIMM slots, you will have to throw out both sticks to go to 32GB later and most people do not want to do that.
-- Regards, Clifford Ilkay + 1 647-778-8696 --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
