Sunday 15 January 2012

Repurposing an old machine

The old machine that I installed Windows XP on in 2009 is now under a desk next door. 1GHz Athlon 32 bit, 40G hard drive, old Radeon card and 512MHz of memory.

It does have 2 removable media drives: one DVD rewriter and one DVD drive.

This is, now, the sort of machine you'd throw away - it won't handle Windows 7 well: it barely handled Windows XP It flies under Debian 6.0 with libreoffice from debian-backports.

It will soon go on to a friend of mine whose computers are even older: he's likely to use this machine extensively because it has real serial ports.

Use Linux - it makes sense on any hardware.

3 comments:

  1. I'm pretty sure XP needs less than recent full blown Linux desktop. Athlon was great processor when XP was released.

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  2. I've got an old IBM Think Centre that's a 3GHz Pentium IV with 512MB RAM running Debian Squeeze quite happily (uptime is nearly one hundred days: I'm using it to serve web pages via Zone Edit).

    There's an even older PC down the shed that I've installed Squeeze on but I'm running out of office space (mostly taken up by a couple of HP D350 Xeon 3GHz Quad core servers again running Squeeze).

    Have never used Windows in nearly thirty years of computing (originally started on Classic Mac OS) & never will...

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  3. Real serial ports are not a problem even today. Most of mother boards has connector for one and there are PCI(e) cards with more of those.

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