[GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP PC;

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 28/07/16 01:50 PM, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
> Interesting. And encouraging. Maybe I can hold out a while longer, and 
> keep using dial-up with the new Linux PC, postponing the extra expense 
> of DSL versus dial-up. I pay today $15 / mo. (+taxes) for dial-up 
> access. My ISP (Start.ca) wants $40 / mo. (plus taxes) for 5 Mbs DSL 
> service.

If you are spending $15 per month on dial-up Internet, you are also 
spending something for your hard line. I was spending $60 per month my 
hard line until I realized everyone in my home had cell phones and had 
made the hard line superfluous. Your hard line plus the dial-up service 
probably will not cost appreciably more and may end up costing less than 
a DSL or cable Internet service. You will also have a much better user 
experience with that compared to dial-up.

Your stated goal of comparing the dial-up experience on XP to Linux is 
really pointless unless you run the test on the same hardware hitting 
the same host at the same time. Of course a 12 year old machine with a 
crufty Windows XP installation running a browser that does not support 
modern web standards is going to be slower than a modern machine running 
any modern operating system running any modern browser. It seems like a 
lot of bother to prove something of little consequence.

If one of your concerns in sticking with dial-up is that you still want 
the XP machine to have Internet access, you could add a second network 
card to your new machine and have it act as a router/firewall/gateway 
for the XP machine, which is for the best anyway given that XP no longer 
gets security updates.

You may be able to convert your Outlook mail to Thunderbird following 
this article. <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files> Once you 
have converted, set up an IMAP server on the new Linux machine and store 
your mail in IMAP format.

I do not remember when Microsoft switched to the .docx and .xlsx 
formats. If the default file extension in Office 2003 is .doc and .xls, 
it should be quite painless to convert those files to Libre/OpenOffice. 
The newer file formats are a bit trickier but it usually works without 
any problems because most people do not use features of Word or Excel 
that causes problems. I have only run into issues with heavily formatted 
documents and with Excel macros.

I have built many systems since the late '80s. I have never bought a 
case that did not come with all the hardware I needed and I have never 
had a system not boot the first time I turned it on. The machine on 
which I am typing this, I assembled from components in Sep. 2009. I have 
since upgraded various components and I will probably assemble another 
machine this fall. If you can assemble IKEA furniture, you can assemble 
a PC.

It sounds like you may want to experiment with different distributions. 
If so, you should consider going straight to 32GB of RAM for the nominal 
price difference over the lifespan of the machine so that you can play 
around with different distributions running in virtual machines. You can 
get by with 16GB of RAM but if your motherboard has only two DIMM slots, 
you will have to throw out both sticks to go to 32GB later and most 
people do not want to do that.

-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+ 1 647-778-8696