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Running new OSs on old hardware

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Simon

Tue Dec 26 2006, 02:43AM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

Steve Conner wrote ...

PS: I'm very impressed that people are still using PIIs and 486s, that's thrifty :-o

It's fun because you can do whatever you want with one, without fear about how expensive it will be to replace.

Also, if you keep the bloatware away and don't use them for watching DVDs, they're fine. An efficiently run PII runs better than the typical latest and greatest.

Steve Conner

Tue Dec 26 2006, 11:54AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Yes, bloatware is such a curse! If you've got any tips on managing it, I'm sure a lot of folks would be interested. I thought I had it under control, but I've not got to the stage where I can get a 486 to do anything useful

My strategy is to keep a few old boxen around to install stuff on that I want to try out, so I can keep my new machine clean and bloat-free.

You are right about the latest and greatest thing. My new box is a 3GHz P4 with 2GB of ram and dual 200GB SATA drives, yet it doesn't really feel any faster than my old 733MHz P3. Well, until I start editing big digital audio files. It can do jobs in 2 seconds that took about 2 minutes on the old box, probably because it has so much RAM that it can operate on the whole file in memory. I guess there's more to computer "fastness" than just a couple of numbers.

Bjørn

Tue Dec 26 2006, 12:52PM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

I have several PCs from a 486 with Windows 95 to a P4 with Windows XP, they all boot in the same amount of time give or take a couple of seconds even if the fastest machine is 300 times faster than the slowest one. One of them runs FreeBSD and it is quite sluggish.

My old Acorn A5000 with a 25 MHz CPU and 4MB RAM boots to the GUI in 2 seconds so progress has been fairly steady in the wrong direction.

RAM on a P4 machine is usually is a lot faster than on P3 machines. My previous P3 computer did 2-300MB/s, my P4 does 2GB/s so that accounts for a lot of the speed difference.

Nucleophobe

Thu Dec 28 2006, 03:51PM

Registered Member #108 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 11:44PM
Location: Billings, MT
Posts: 61

I've had windows xp on an old 266mhz lappy with 96mb ram for a long time. It runs fine, actually. I used nLite to slim down the install; its a great utility to eliminate bloat.

...

Thu Dec 28 2006, 05:06PM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

This is sorta pushing it, but it is a new os (2.6.15-hh2 kernel with an Opie GUI) on a sorta-old piece of hardware (released july-04), but it still has similar specs of most of your old machines. She is running an Intel pxa270 624mhz processor, 64 MB Mobile SDRAM, TNETW1100B (aka acx100) wlan chipset, BRF6150 bluetooth chipset, 4" 480x640 display with a ATI Mobileon W3220 graphics chipset, and a 1.8a/hr battery

The bulk of the storage is a 128mb cf card because it won't read my 4gb sd card, but once I get that sorted (either by getting a 2gb one or finding a kernel patch) it will have a cf->usb host card so that I can connect a mouse/keyboard/hdd/printer/whatever.

It runs pretty fast, for an embedded computer, but browsing the net is slow. Like loading a page on this forum takes at least 30 seconds. I am not sure why, any ideas? The first thing I thought was that the ram was to slow, but looking around it looks like similar ram has read times in the 10ns range, so it seems like that shouldn't be the bottleneck...

Simon

Thu Dec 28 2006, 11:35PM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

wrote ...

My old Acorn A5000 with a 25 MHz CPU and 4MB RAM boots to the GUI in 2 seconds so progress has been fairly steady in the wrong direction.

That's exactly how I feel about computers.

wrote ...

Yes, bloatware is such a curse! If you've got any tips on managing it, I'm sure a lot of folks would be interested.

I'm not sure I'm doing so well against the tide but I'm glad to share a few of my favourites.

For video editing/conversion/etc: VirtualDubMod. It takes a little getting used to (kind of like a typical nix program) but is powerful and slim. It has a range of filters but unfortunately it mysteriously lacks a couple like fade in and fade out. Still one of my favourite non-bloats.

For audio editing/mixing/etc: CoolEdit 95. This has pretty much everything you really need. For converting audio, use sox. (The latest versions of sox work with lame and mad for mp3.)

For images: Paint Shop Pro 4. Those of you familiar with the modern versions of this will find it hopelessly inadequate but for typical photo/image editing it's powerful.

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