“Old” computers.
I got my start in computers with the Commodore 64, Apple IIe, SRS80, and Tandy 1000. I had the C64 at home as a kid. It was so cool, it had COLOR! The 64 stood for 64 K ram. Yes to any kids reading this, that is Kilobyte, not Megabyte, not Gigabyte, Kilobyte. As in 65,536 bytes of ram.
As the years went on I had the 286,386, 486SX, 486DX, 486DX2, Pentium 60 and so on. Around 10 to 12 years ago I built an AMD K6-2 based computer and bought an Apple Mac G4-400. I still have those. In fact I am using the G4-400 to write this. I have a modern OS on it (Fedora 10 PPC Linux) and it runs fine for web surfing, word processing, E-mail. The only real limitation is lack of Flash player for PPC. I guess no Youtube.com. The K6-2 is not used right now. As I remember it has a bad component. But it is still here and I could fix it if I wanted. But why?
In the last 10 years there has been an important change in computers. We no longer need the post powerful computer made JUST to get work done. I would bet 99% of home users (read web surfing, word processing, and E-mail) would be just fine with this old mac G4-400 if it could play Youtube with out problems. The K6-2 could, it has a Flashplayer available for it. We only need the high power units for CPU and video intensive games. In reality there are very few games that NEED the most powerful computers. But then I am not a computer gamer. But I am a power user.
We start running in to problems as the operating system (OS) needs more power “just to run” Microsoft Vista is one example. It does not run on our laptops. We have a set of 1.6 GHz, 512 Meg ram laptops that will not run Vista, even tho that was our only choice at the store. They are SLOOWER than this G4-400. So painful that Vista has been removed from them. The wife’s now has Fedora 10 Linux only. Mine has Fedora and XP pro. Under Fedora 10 they run GREAT. Fast boot up, full DVD quality video from out MythTV server, audio editing, graphics editing. I can have a dozen applications open spread across 4 desktops and slide from one to another as needed. All this from a $300 clearance computer that CAN’T run M$ Vista. Oh and the kiker? The linux partitions of the hard drive are encrypted. This is done at the basic level of the OS. It is in place BEFORE the real install starts! Other than a nice long pass phrase at start up I don’t even notice it. If some one takes it all they get is the laptop. They can’t even look at my web browsing history or file names.
So next time your looking to “upgrade” that “OLD SLOW Computer” Think about what you really need it to do. If it is running Windows XP maybe it just needs a clean reinstall. (DON’T FORGET TO BACK UP YOUR DATA!” If it is running VIsta (or any Windows variant) maybe a true upgrade to Linux is in order.
Have fun computing!