Ars gear: the old Windows PC resurrected with Ubuntu

A five year old laptop is what this guy is calling "old"? Gimme a freaking break. I'm running the latest version of Slackware on an 11 yr old PC and am loathe to upgrade my hardware. My Asus eee gathers dust in the corner.

nb

notbob - all depends on what one uses it for, I guess.

Upgrading isn't a bad idea, depending on what the "old" hardware is and what you're using it for. While clock speeds aren't racing exponentially ahead like they did 10 years ago, newer hardware is frequently much more energy-efficient than old stuff (esp. anything made in the P4 era), so you're likely to quickly recover your cost in energy savings. This goes double for upgrading to an LCD monitor from an old CRT. If you still have one of those horrible monsters around, I urge you to upgrade ASAP.

Reuse is often not worth it. Memory modules and video cards for old interfaces are usually quite a bit more expensive than those for current interfaces. Some of it is due to better technology but also vendor competition. Systems using SDRAM, DDR, and AGP are not really adequate for current 3D games (i.e. anything teens actually want to play). One only needs so many old systems for servers and thin clients.

11 year old PC or 11year old laptop? desktop boxes are more durable, and get less stressed. i have several that lasted more than 5 years. but not a single laptop that survived longer than that, ok, maybe my grandma's because she never moves it, so it was treated like a desktop.

greetings, eMBee.

Oldest working I have is a 7 years old and I still play Oblivion on it. It is an old Acer. And I haven't used it with much care, lived through my university life.

And my uncle still has an old Windows 3.1 Asus notebook. Working in good condition.

Five years is OLD for a Windows PC. I can almost guarantee you such hardware won't run Windows 8. The old Microsoft/Intel upgrade treadmill is alive and well. Sure, Linux supports old hardware but new versions of Windows generally do not.

My 7 years old Acer runs the last preview well. 5 years isn't really that old. This was five years ago: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T61

Quite capable of running Windows 8. As I said, even a 7 years old model runs it. I am using it with Windows 7 without any problems and mostly play old RPGs like Oblivion, Morrowind, Gothic series...

Next week on This Old PC...

Jonathan Corbet makes a good point here:

Jonathan Corbet wrote:As Linux moves into the consumer electronics world, the ability and the desire to support last year's devices are both falling by the wayside.

Something to think about.

I have a 10 year old Dell C640, with docking station, that runs just fine (battery is dead, but that's all). I just put Lubuntu 12.04 on it... runs fine. I have plans to turn it into a print server and communication terminal...

gus3,

I read it as a good point from Jonatahn Corbet too! Once any OS-maintaining company drops support for particular classes of older devices, users of those older devices could be left out in the cold.

That's why some pressure from other distros for those older Win$uck$ PCs keeps Baboontu and other low-end Baboontu wannabes on their toes. They drop support for the older devices, users still keep those devices around, the users try other still-supported distros (like Slackware for _notbob), and then those users probably stick with these tried-and-true ones without having the need to switch to the latest-and-splashiest. I think Steven_Rosenber made similar good points about original Debian for older PCs as well? Certainly more straightforward and basic for older PCs than any of the "improved" Baboontus with their groovy New Age desktop environments! Slackware and Debian are even easily scalable DOWNWARD for efficient, non-server/non-workstation purposes on older PCs --- such as for example simple file servers, webservers, firewall/routers.

2c