would you buy a 1.8 ghz system

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ub520
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would you buy a 1.8 ghz system

#1 Post by ub520 »

this would be puppy 2.15ce
1.5ghz
512mb of ram
32mb sis card
30 gb hard drive
and $200

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veronicathecow
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#2 Post by veronicathecow »

As long as it does not have an IBM Deathstar (I mean Deskstar) HDD which tend to explode (okay not leteraly but I had three die on me,,,) then looks like a nice fast machine to me.

ub520
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#3 Post by ub520 »

western digital. fan of wd and will always use wd.

Sage
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#4 Post by Sage »

Possibly on the wrong Forum? or got the wrong end of the proverbial stick?
Puppy is a compact distro, originally intended as a liveCD/USB/CF. The idea is that you pull that long defunct P233 from under the bed or pick up some junk from a roadside skip and use that. The 128Mb (160Mb for 2.15CE) RAM + small swap partition are the only important minimum criteria. Go-faster stripes not needed! That $ sign tells its own tale! We don't do money here - that's the other guy in Redmond.

ub520
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#5 Post by ub520 »

233mhz goe fast as winxp on .5ghz
1.5ghz puppy faster than core 2 duo win xp
this an idea for a good pc

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bostonvaulter
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#6 Post by bostonvaulter »

yup my laptop has a Pentium M 2.00 GHZ so it's super fast, except i wish swiftfox were faster sometimes... I think Puppy can be used for more than old computers, that's one of the best things about it, it can scale to newer hardware and still remain superfast.

That looks like a good computer, pretty good price too, but with puppy (and heavily depending on the programs you're running) you could get better value by buying older and cheaper hardware.

Jason
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Lobster
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#7 Post by Lobster »

32mb sis card
I would recommend a (second hand is fine) Nvidia card. It really has made a differnce to my use of stumbleupon video

http://video.stumbleupon.com/

I have not found the SIS cards to be good. Just cheap. Graphic cards are one component I have never know to burn out or 'break', so second hand is OK. Puppy works across a range of machines. Some people are more comfortable with new and do not frequent skips (Strange but true Sage . . .)

Beryl is coming to Puppy and a good graphics card is useful - just do not need those overpriced new ones.

Puppy is fun. Have fun.
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Sage
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#8 Post by Sage »

Is that right, Lob.?!
I'll just be a mo. whilst I change out of this bowler and pin-stripe into my skip skimming uniform...

On the other hand, I have several 'burned out' (except they aren't burnt) ATI cards. They all date from before the take-over, but are relatively 'new'.
Difficult to beat those old Cirrus Logic cards for shear staying power.

twodees
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Re: would you buy a 1.8 ghz system

#9 Post by twodees »

ub520 wrote:this would be puppy 2.15ce
1.5ghz
512mb of ram
32mb sis card
30 gb hard drive
and $200
When I decided to try some Linux distros, I bought a refurbished machine close to what you're describing. I got it from pcsurplus.com and it came with a clean, wiped hard drive w/o any OS at all. I used it to try out Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and PCLOS. What I learned in short order was that I needed an external hardware modem for my dialup and a good used graphics card.

The machine is an IBM P4 and cost $199 with free shipping. The graphics card came from pcsurplus as well and cost $16 including shipping. Not counting the hardware modem, my total cost for the machine is still under $220.

Puppy runs great on that machine as well as on the old used P3 laptop I have which has only 256M of RAM

I'd do the same again. Getting a good refurbished machine made it very nearly painless to convert from Windows to Linux, though I tried a few unsatisfactory distros before finding Puppy.

My two desktops which have XP on them have been moved off the desk. One's in the garage and the other will be as soon as it stops raining here ;-). My daughter's desktop is now also running Puppy and she hasn't asked to go back to XP.

I'd say go for the machine purchase, but check what pcsurplus.com has first. Extra RAM doesn't hurt and $200 is a good price.

Sage
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#10 Post by Sage »

People will GIVE you suitable old machines to save themselves the effort of a visit to the local dump. I known this to be true on both continents. The big question is how many you can take away, not how many $$$ you can dissipate from your a/c.

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MU
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#11 Post by MU »

Only very few SIS graficscard support DRI (hardware accelleration).
And I think even with one that supports it, we had no positive feedback yet in the 3DCC thread from the user who tried it.

Ati is good - but their drivers are not. Somewhat unstable with Kernel 2.6, at least in Puppy. Also new versions of their drivers dropped support for Radeon 92xx and older (3DCC still offers older drivers for this reason).
Fortunately the freedesktop.org drivers work fine, so you still can use old, cheap and fast Ati radeon cards.
But new cards might not be supported yet by the free drivers, so in that case you depend on the buggy closed source drivers.

Nvidia has better closed source drivers, but there are no good free drivers from freedesktop.org.
Also try to google if a model is supported or not on Linux, I think some are not.

I think my favourite choice would be a old Ati Radeon (9600) with the free drivers as the best compromize.
If you are hardcore gamer (Windows), you might try to get a newer Nvidia, but check in advance, if our nvidia-installer supports it.

Mark
Last edited by MU on Fri 27 Apr 2007, 17:39, edited 2 times in total.

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MU
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#12 Post by MU »

concerning CPU/Ram:
a Pentium 700 rocks with 512 MB.
You might upgrade more Ram if you want to use .sfs addons. If OpenOffice runs from Ram instead from harddisk, it might be faster.
I think I recognized that KDE runs snappier like that.
So if I had the choice between a P700 with 1 Gig Ram, and a P2000 with 512 MB, I would choose the P700.
This applies only to standard applications.
CPU-intensive programs like compilers and 3D-Renderers would run faster on the 2000 Mhz computer.

Mark

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Flash
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#13 Post by Flash »

Lobster, I had an AGP graphics card go bad on me a while back. I don't remember which one it was - something-or-other Vega? - but it was about 5 years old when it quit.

Where I work, we need powerful, high-resolution cards for graphics editing. I know that the guy who takes care of our computers has replaced several graphics cards.

Motherboards with onboard video seem to have no trouble handling anything I do at home.
[url=http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=69321][color=blue]Puppy Help 101 - an interactive tutorial for Lupu 5.25[/color][/url]

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