Call for salvaged hardware!

[William Park]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 02:13:56PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 7:33 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > How did this go?
> >
> > Did it turn out to be a way to "consume" old computers?
> >
> > How old?  I ask because I'm finally thinking of getting rid of some of
> > my heap of old machines.  Mostly PII era stuff.
> > --
> 
> i'd say more that it turned out to be a way to consume *used*
> computers, most of which were not actually very old.  PII's are not so
> great for beginners to use!  because it's hard to run the big shiny
> new distros on them -- and the mroe customization you have to do
> before yo start, the more there is for folks to learn.  We used mostly
> fast P3's and some P4's (a couple with processors in the 2-3GHz
> range).
> 
> It would be nice to know what to do with genuinely old computers.
> There's also an environmental question -- when you can buy an embedded
> system with the same processing power, it's not obvious that running
> big fat p2 desktops is really a green alternative.  i would very much
> like to hear others' ideas on this subject.

Building up a computer is good start for learning.  And, for that
purpose, old P2/P3/P4 are useless, mainly because of DDR2/3 RAM and SATA
disk.  I guess you can recycle PCI sound and ethernet.  But, anything
built into the motherboard would be useless.

-- 
William

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