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

Sat Jul 30 01:27:13 EDT 2016

Hello Clifford,

Thanks for your message.

My comments are inline below.

Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "CLIFFORD ILKAY via talk" <talk at gtalug.org>
To: <talk at gtalug.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 4:03 PM
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP 
PC;

> 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.
>

I don't understand what you mean by "hard line".

I use no "hard line" apart from my landline telephone service over the 
telco's twisted copper pair. The dial-up modem connects througn this 
same telephone landline (twisted copper pair) service. I use no cell 
phone. And there's nobody else here.

What is "hard line" technology? Is this not just a generic term for DSL 
(over twisted coper pair) or cable or e.g. Bell Fibe?

When I switch to DSL, the connection is going to use the same twisted 
copper pair, with some fancy new interface at the telco central office 
end, where "my" twisted copper pair terminates. My ISP will provide and 
setup the DSL modem at my end of the twisted copper pair.

> 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.
>

My main purpose is not curiosity. It's to minimize the psychological 
stress of the switchover from the Win XP PC to the new Linux PC. Please 
see my reply to Lennart where I explain this.

> 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.
>

Once I have switched to using the new Linux PC as my live production 
system, I hope I never ever need to connect the old Win XP to the 
Internet.

> 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 prefer to avoid all such complications like IMAP. I plan to continue 
to use the same POP3 email hosting service I use now, fetch the email to 
the local Thunderbird installation, and delete the mail from the POP3 
server.

> 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.
>

In my Outlook Express mail store folder in the Win XP filesystem, I see 
only *.dbx files. I believe *.dbx is some kind of ancient FoxPro-like 
indexed file representation.

If Thunderbird can import a complete Outlook Express email folder 
structure, from a Linux directory containing a copy of the Outlook 
Express mail store folder (with all its *.dbx files) then the mail 
should transfer over easily. I do wonder about implications of the 
difference in text line end conventions, between Windows and Linux.

If Thunderbird cannot import the mail as I describe above, then what I 
would prefer to have, is a complete export of my Outlook Express emails, 
with each email in *.eml format, and the mail folder structure 
represented by a directory structure in the file system. This way I will 
have an open-standards-based archive of all my emails from the Win XP 
PC. Then I will need some kind of "loader" program that loads the 
equivalent email structure into Thunderbird, from this directory 
structure with *.eml files.

Outlook Express lets me save an individual open email in the *.eml file 
format. But Outlook Express provides no way to bulk export the entire 
mail folder structure to *.eml representation. From my research (not 
from hands-on use) what Microsoft does provide, is an API on Win XP for 
a C / C++ programmer to walk the Outlook Express email folder tree, and 
extract emails.

<snip>

>
> 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.
>

The motherboard (ASRock Z97 EXTREME6 ATX LGA1150) has 4 x 240-pin DDR3 
(Double Data Rate 3) DIMM slots,
and supports Dual Channel Memory Technology.

So I can start with 2 x 8 GB DIMMs (for 16 GB) and add later another 2 x 
8 GB DIMMs (to get a total of 32 GB).

> -- 
> Regards,
>
> Clifford Ilkay
>
> + 1 647-778-8696
>
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