[GTALUG] GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC

[Steve Petrie, P.Eng.]

Hello Lennart,

Thanks for your message.

My comments are inline below.

Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie at aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" 
<talk at gtalug.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 3:40 PM
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC


> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:50:00PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via 
> talk wrote:
>> Mainly because I use dial-upon the Win XP system, and I don't want 
>> the
>> hassle of changing it to use DSL, before I get the new Linux PC. 
>> Also,
>> I'm curious to see if the experience with dial-up is better on Linux
>> than on Win XP.
>
> I can't imagine anything that would make it better on Linux.  Web 
> pages
> are simply not designed with low bandwidth in mind these days.
>

I agree that dial-up is painfully slow loading many web pages. My 
experience used to be that web pages loaded slowly over dial-up. But 
they always used to load successfully. Over the years there's been a 
gradual degradation in page load reliability until today, when far too 
many pages just fail to load completely on the first attempt and I have 
to retry the load. My ISP (understandably) is not interested in finding 
out the cause of these problems.

>> I do plan, after the Linux PC is operational, to switch to DSL.
>
> Well in that case, it would seem a waste to buy a modem that works 
> with
> linux at all.  If you already have one, that's different.  Dialup 
> modems
> are not that cheap these days due to lack of demand.
>

Here's the complication that motivates me to first, get a dial-up modem 
working on the new Linux PC, and then, switch the Internet link from 
dial-up to e.g. DSL.

Right now, I run my Internet life (email, web browsing) on the Win XP PC 
using dial-up.

If I switch to DSL before I set up the new Linux PC, then I'm going to 
have to update the Win XP PC to work with the DSL modem (e.g. seeing it 
as an Ethernet router). I really am not keen to mess around with 
changing the Windows XP PC to DSL from dial-up, when I'm planning to 
quit using the Win XP PC anyway.

Maybe I'm just a Nervous Nellie, but I would rather try first to get the 
Linux PC to work with a dial-up modem, so I can continue to use dial-up 
on the Windows XP PC for my live production email operations.

Once I have switched to using the new Linux PC for email and web 
browsing via dial-up modem, then I can comfortably upgrade my telco 
twisted copper pair from dial-up to DSL, and I only have to cope with 
getting the new Linux PC to work with DSL. And never bother to switch 
the Win XP PC over to use DSL.

>
> -- 
> Len Sorensen