Older computers - are you using them?

[No_windows]

I used too old hardware for too long and don't have the patience for it anymore. I started out running 8088's in the 486 era, although not under Linux, of course. Having said that, my hardware isn't exactly new. One computer is a dual core (hyerthreading?) Athlon, and the other is an HP server with dual quad-core Xeons. I recently attained a few Celerons and P4's and got rid of them. I almost kept one of the P4s but ultimately decided that I didn't need another older computer that would basically duplicate the functionality of what I've already got.

The AMD Athlon is from 2007, I think, and I'm not sure about the HP server...... the bios says 2010, but that doesn't mean much.

[tomazzi]

Of course, I'm trying to re-use old HW - why?
I could make a *very long* list of points *WHY*, but it would make no sense...

So, only a brief list here: old HW is:
- tested and safe (in regard to Snowden "discoveries" - old HW can be often found "firmwareless", and thus non-voulnerable )
- much less prone to bugs coming from the ROHS fallacy (bad/broken junction phenomenon)
- DDR memory is faster or in the worst case *not slower* than DDR2, which is a crap...
- old CPU's have *working* extensions - unlike a crap like Haswell - where Intel, again, gave a crap to their customers, namely the broken TSX extension...
...etc, etc, that list could be *very* long.

The only "problem" with old HW is that You *sometimes* have to replace old, leaking electrolytic capacitors with a new ones...

Regards.

[otyugh]

I kind of abandonned the old PCs with the "buzz" of cheap arm devices "raspberrypi-like". Open hardware and low energy consumption just gained my heart : if I had electronic paper as display to complement it, I would also be happy and might buy it.

My only concern is the devices livespan of such devices, and being some more stupid **** being caught in the last "green alternatives" available, just buying more electronic stuff...


So basically yes. if I'm willing to rebrand all computers for people, I'm not coherent and use for myself "brand new" olinuxinos devices, for now...I don't know if i'm doing a good deal for ecology, I really don't ; but for now I've got a noise less computer, and that feels good.

[horgh]

I used to be big into using older computers. A few years ago I got openbsd installed on a 33mhz 486. Took a bit of work!

I am not so much anymore though. The big thing that changed for me this was the power efficiency argument. I don't mind spending time getting them working (it's fun, this thread was a good read) but if it is going to cost or waste more to run them than a more modern computer then it makes it a more difficult decision.

I like the low powered devices that have been coming out recently for a similar reason I used to like these old computers. I've been using a raspberry pi as a desktop for a few years now and it is satisfying.

[oswaldkelso]

I just totted up my computers
PowerPC, how many, Booted? not used (over 1yr) rarely (with in 1 yr) used montly, weekly daily,

Imac 333, 1, play thing not used, Bought new
eMac 1.25ghz, 2, play things rarely used, Given
G4 tower 733mhz, 1, play thing rarely used, Bought years back
G4 tower 800mhz, 1, play thing not used, Bought £20 about 6 years back
G4 imac 1.25ghz, 1, play thing rarely used, Given
G4 power book, 1, play thing rarely used, Given
G5 imac, 1, Mostly used to watch films. Has a nice big screen. Used monthly, Given

PC towers, 4, spares, Given
Dell inspiron 530, 1, Main machine used every day ,
Acer AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+, 1, used weekly,
Laptops

X60T, 1, libre-boot plaything used monthly, Bought
Samsung nc10, 1, "I use this a lot if on the move. Used Weekly, great machine", Bought new
Dell Latitude 5420, 1, "Main laptop, very good in all departments. Used daily", Bought
ACER ASPIRE 5315, 1, Running Trisquel used as a guest laptop used monthly, Given
Lenovo T520, 1, "currently on loan , will be bedroom film machine", Bought for kids given back as they all use smart phones
Acer one A150, 1, Used at girl friends saves me taking mine. Used weekly, Bought for kids given back as they all use smart phones
Hannspree 10 netbook, 1, play thing not used, Bought for kids given back as they all use smart phones
Esystems M410, 1, play thing used monthly, Given

RPI, 1, play thing to be replaced by Lenovo T520 for films, Bought

n900, 1, used, Bought second hand

Total, 24

I clearly have to many. I could get rid of all the PowerPCs except maybe the G5 and all the towers. Though I prefer to sit at a desktop machine.

If I had to keep one it would be the DellLatitude 5420. Well built, good backlit keyboard, good screen as libre hardware as you can get easily. I changed the wifi card. I would prefer seperate audio in and out but can live with the dual one.

I could get by with all of them even the G3 imac but wouldn't choose it. One reason I am so picky about my desktop setup is I need it to run on all my machines. The mantra "openbox, rox, tint2, fbpanel and now fittstool" make my computing experiance similar on all of them the speed drop on the older machines while noticable is not painfully so at least until you start a big browser. And I mean start, once running don't shut it down. Dillo and netsurf on the G3 and really old stuff helps, as does Seamonkey on the rest compared iceweasel I stay well clear of things that don't run on all my platforms so no hogs like Chromium

ops forgot I have a 8mhz mac classic somewhere in the shed waiting to increase in value ....or rust

[keithpeter]

If I had to keep one it would be the DellLatitude 5420. Well built, good backlit keyboard, good screen as libre hardware as you can get easily. I changed the wifi card. I would prefer seperate audio in and out but can live with the dual one.

I got one of these cheap off e*ay based on oswaldkelso's recommendation in a post here a year or two ago. I replaced the wifi card with one that uses free software drivers and the result is a tank like machine with built in DVD drive that will boot just about any Linux. The screen will give you a suntan at full brightness.

The one I carry round is a Thinkpad X200 which is about half the weight of the Dell. Encrypted hard drive in case I leave it on the bus. If I decided to rationalise the stock it would be this one that I keep to be honest. My lower back would not cope with shifting the Dell around and I prefer the older Thinkpad keyboards.

The testing laptop is a Thinkpad X61s core duo with an Atheros wifi card built in instead of the usual Intel one - hence no binary freeware needed. I have one core switched off in the BIOS and I have 512Mb of RAM in at present to simulate a lower power machine. Copes OK with XFCE and firefox with a hosts file that forwards most adverts to localhost, see

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

which is updated. Without that hosts file or without noscript or an add blocker Firefox bogs down pretty quickly...

[ljones0]

I don't use that much older hardware these days. But I do still use it!

My main system is however a reasonably new machine. It's an AMD FX4100 quad core with 16GB Ram. Video is via a PCI-E card on a late 2000s Radeon HD 4850. Mind you the full tower case it is in dates from the late 90s.....

Older hardware can be useful however, especially for single tasks. If you poke around on ebay for long enough you'll turn up some machines called "thin clients". These can be had for not much money and can be repurposed - this website tells you how to do so.

Usually it isn't much more than a) find a power supply (most - but not all - use a "normal" powe supply), b) pull the DOM ("Disk on module") off, c) replace DOM with something like an IDE to CF or SD card converter with a short ribbon cable and then finally installing an OS. These devices don't use much electricty, are often quite small and could be used (for example) as a small, low-end server, an internet radio maybe even a standalone device to run an emulator - fancy a "new old" Commodore 64? And these devices don't usually cost too much although there are always the rip-off-o-thon places and people on ebay to look out for.

I went through a patch a while back trying out different ARM based devices but nowadays I find I'm moving away from the whole ARM platform. Reason why? The ARM platform is a mess, weird bootloaders that are never explained, ARM (as in the company) being linux unfriendly, propietary drivers needed everywhere, potential digital locks the list goes on. x86 stuff might not be *hugely* better but there's a lot more chance of getting it working.

Worst case you end up with something like the Efika MX Smartbook - still a usable device or it would be but because of propietary software it is effectively locked to an old 2.6 kernel - want a newer kernel you can run one, but then X is unaccelerated and then painfully slow. And then there's all the other devices to get to work - assuming you can....

Though it is no surprise. I find this sort of thing a lot with many manufacturers (especially phones) these days. Device appars, there's support for a year or two and updates then the manfuacturer ends up getting bored with it and support ends and the device gets forgotten about. Seems to happen mostly with phones - come buy your new phone then a year later dump it because the next one's just appeared....

At least a lot of the older stuff and that is x86 based will often work. Need to try it again but I have somewhere a very old (bought off ebay for not a lot!) Neoware Thintune thin client - an old thin client; 200Mhz CPU, 64MB Ram (I Upped mine to 256MB); Sis 550 video; 2 USB 1.1 drivers. Last thing I tried was puppy linux on it and it run quite well all things considered. Even an older debian worked!

As a sidenote and I apologise for going off topic, I'm also thinking here about flat screen displays and TVs. In a way some of this applies to (well to me!) finding a new flat screen monitor or display of some sort. I had to find an older model of flat screen TV (just recently to replace an older duff monitor and which would not take HDMI or even DVI) to use as a monitor as most these days are of the annoying "smart" variety - devices which spy and watch on you or might even refuse to work with full functionality, or constantly want you to "connect it to the 'net". Or it's >£500 for a smaller screen flat screen monitor. I wonder what I'm going to be doing when this screen bites the dust and *everything* is "smart" .... x.x

ljones

[No_windows]

Mind you the full tower case it is in dates from the late 90s.....

Nice, mine is early 2000's, or at least that's when the company whose name was on it went out of business. The only think I dislike about old cases is that they have that pesky fdd hole. What I've done with this case is to remove all plastic. It's what I call bare-bones. I took all the rivets out, blasted the sheet metal and primed it. I then reassembled the case with stainless rivets, and assembled with stainless button Allen-head screws. I'm sure it's not everyones cup of tea, but it's served me well.

At one time, I had an AMD k6-2 in an old AT/386 style case.

My pride is my 1986 IBM Model M keyboard, However.

[ljones0]

Mind you the full tower case it is in dates from the late 90s.....

Nice, mine is early 2000's, or at least that's when the company whose name was on it went out of business. The only think I dislike about old cases is that they have that pesky fdd hole. What I've done with this case is to remove all plastic. It's what I call bare-bones. I took all the rivets out, blasted the sheet metal and primed it. I then reassembled the case with stainless rivets, and assembled with stainless button Allen-head screws. I'm sure it's not everyones cup of tea, but it's served me well.

At one time, I had an AMD k6-2 in an old AT/386 style case.

My pride is my 1986 IBM Model M keyboard, However.

Intresting though I don't have the abilities to do that sort of thing!

Must also mention two PCs I have here as well - two mini towers that aren't "branded" PCs but date also from the late 90s. I don't think the hardware inside these PCs is from that time (possibly from the early 2000s) but with a new PSU (the old PSUs are ment for things like 700Mhz Athlons!) chip, board and RAM I could surprise everyone and have an older-looking machine that's brand new !

ljones

[HuangLao]

Of course. I have an 8-10 year old Gateway laptop (cant remember when lol) with Debian 8-32bit and a 5+ year old HP with Debian 8-64bit. Both chug along nicely with Debian.

I am a big fan of off lease business pc's or building your own!

[alderaan]

I have an old laptop which I bought second hand 9 years ago (that is before 2006) and is safe to say it is a few years older.
* CPU: Intel Mobile Pentium 4 2.40 Ghz
* RAM: 512 MiB

It is dual booting 2 different versions of Debian but it's main use is loading a local doudoulinux.iso file (through a custom grub line) in order for the kids to familiarize themselves with computers, passing their time with educational applications.

[pcdoctor01]

Just put lxde on my Dad's desktop with 1gb. I told him that this is better than xp.

[fred barclay]

Both of my machines are old--one is 7-8 years old (Vista was running on in when I got it) and the other between 12-15 years old (XP-era). The older one has:
1.7 GHz single-core Intel Celeron CPU (32-bit, of course)
1016MB RAM
250GB HDD

It runs Arch with MATE and Debian Sid Xfce quite nicely. Having the large hard drive is nice because I can easily dual/triple boot and play around with distros.
Now to be fair, the only reason I use them heavily is economic reasons--I simply can't afford "the latest and the greatest!" I have dreams of a 8-core, 32-GB RAM machine with a heavy-duty Nvidia GPU and a 500GB HDD + a 500GB SDD. Until that day comes, though, I'll keep these old guys around as my main players.

[NFT5]

I apologise for going off topic, I'm also thinking here about flat screen displays and TVs. In a way some of this applies to (well to me!) finding a new flat screen monitor or display of some sort. I had to find an older model of flat screen TV (just recently to replace an older duff monitor and which would not take HDMI or even DVI) to use as a monitor as most these days are of the annoying "smart" variety - devices which spy and watch on you or might even refuse to work with full functionality, or constantly want you to "connect it to the 'net". Or it's >£500 for a smaller screen flat screen monitor. I wonder what I'm going to be doing when this screen bites the dust and *everything* is "smart" .... x.x

I figure this thread is, indirectly about saving money, so I'll respond. Computer flat screens are cheap, especially if you stay below the 22" size. But for bigger screens, right up to 60"+, almost all manufacturers make a "dumb" version of the all singing, all dancing, bells and whistles versions that you see in the shops. They're used for commercial installations where cost (i.e. tender price) is an issue and run to display information, not TV. They're much cheaper, although you usually have to ask and have them ordered in.

The only think I dislike about old cases is that they have that pesky fdd hole. What I've done with this case is to remove all plastic. It's what I call bare-bones. I took all the rivets out, blasted the sheet metal and primed it. I then reassembled the case with stainless rivets, and assembled with stainless button Allen-head screws. I'm sure it's not everyones cup of tea, but it's served me well.

I own a spray painting business and had kind of forgotten that I've done this, too. Didn't bother about blasting, but a coat of black paint over the old cream certainly freshens up an old case which, if it was decent quality originally, will last forever with periodic internals updates/upgrades as and when required. For the 3.5" FDD hole I've replaced with front mount USB and/or card readers, making that space convenient and useful again.

[No_windows]

......Didn't bother about blasting, but a coat of black paint over the old cream certainly freshens up an old case which, if it was decent quality originally, will last forever with periodic internals updates/upgrades as and when required. For the 3.5" FDD hole I've replaced with front mount USB and/or card readers, making that space convenient and useful again.

I don't recall why I media blasted the case. I do recall it having a large sticker on the back I wanted to remove. It could be that I was simply going to the blaster any way and figured that I may as well blast the case too.

[Starborn]

Just registered here and dediced to throw in my two (euro)cents.

I am running "jessie" - for about a month now - on my old, 2 GHz dual-core Pentium with 2 GB RAM, and it runs fine (although Gnome 3 is an itsy bitsy teenie weenie bit slow, therefore I mostly use LXDE, or Fluxbox when I'm in the mood). This machine is about 8 years old, which can be considered "old" too in PC-land. I plan to upgrade it with another CPU and a Geforce I have lying around somewhere.

A long, long time ago (and in the same galaxy that we are all in), I once installed Xubuntu on a Compaq Armada laptop with a 500 MHz PIII and 512 MB RAM, with IceWM as window manager, which ran smoother than xfce, as was my experience. I got that laptop from a colleague at work and could keep it for free, if I could get it to work (it only needed a new HD). Xubuntu/IceWM worked fine (relatively speaking).

I have always tried to keep my computers for as long as possible. They all develop their own personality (or maybe I just imagine that), and I even give them a name (lame!). With a little luck, Conroe will hold on for a couple of more years.

[mardybear]

Welcome starchild.

Great old hardware story. You mean anthropomorphism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism

I only came about this information because my system, named Grumpy, looked it up on the internet and whispered the answer into my ear

[Starborn]

Hello and thank you, mardibear.

Yes: anthropomorphism indeed!

I name my computers with a "name" that is derived from their hardware parts, such as there being my "Cougar" and my "Puma" (with appropriate wallpaper, of course) for my two Core-i5 based desktop computers (for which Intel used the codename "Sandy Bridge", which I read is also being called "Cougar Point"), and "Conroe" because it was Intel's codename of the Pentium dual core (and Core 2 Duo).
I kinda like such codenames.

Well, I do need a way to be able to distinguish among my three PC's (Four computers, if I count my el cheapo laptop along; or 5 if I include my now ancient PowerPC-based iMac G5 along; or 6 if I count along that old HP "dc5100" SFF computer that I have, or 7 if - never mind )