# is this a good way to go?



## jarrod (Feb 15, 2009)

like i mentioned on another thread i need to replace my cpu.  i'm also a tremendous cheapskate, yet want a fair amount of performance.  so i was thinking of getting a refurbished tower that i saw for around $50.  it had a pentium 4, 512mb RAM, 40g hard drive.  then i was going to suppliment with an external hard drive for like $100.  i have a new moniter & the keyboard from my old system works fine.  does anyone run a set up like this?  any inherent weakness to it?  i'm not doing any serious gaming, but i do a fair amount of video & audio stuff.   

sorry to ask dumb questions, i'm kind of learn-as-i-go when it comes to computers.  

jf


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## Shicomm (Feb 22, 2009)

The price seems a bit low to me , a similar machine would be sold be me ( i sell 2nd hand machines ) for about double that.

But it could work out as a nice machine , try to get some extra memory tough.
XP runs on 512mb but goes smooth with double that.
Assuming that the machine runs on DDR memory ( rect. chips instead of the square chips of DDR2 ) you could get another 512mb for about 25 bucks.


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## Bill Mattocks (Feb 22, 2009)

jarrod said:


> like i mentioned on another thread i need to replace my cpu.  i'm also a tremendous cheapskate, yet want a fair amount of performance.  so i was thinking of getting a refurbished tower that i saw for around $50.  it had a pentium 4, 512mb RAM, 40g hard drive.  then i was going to suppliment with an external hard drive for like $100.  i have a new moniter & the keyboard from my old system works fine.  does anyone run a set up like this?  any inherent weakness to it?  i'm not doing any serious gaming, but i do a fair amount of video & audio stuff.
> 
> sorry to ask dumb questions, i'm kind of learn-as-i-go when it comes to computers.
> 
> jf



It really depends on what your price range is and what you want to do with it.  I'd say 512 MB RAM is a tad on the low side for video, and the video card will matter, too.  Pentium 4 is pretty slow these days.

I buy my parts at www.newegg.com.  But it depends on how comfortable you are with a philips screwdriver.

What you're describing is fine for many things, but it's on the far edge of still being useful from my point of view.


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## Dao (Feb 25, 2009)

If you surf the internet, email and listen to some tunes puppylinux might be for you.  It runs very fast on old hardware.  Windows you will need at least a pentium 4 2.0, I recommend 3.0.


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## jarrod (Feb 27, 2009)

thanks for the replies all.  i settled on a refurb i got with a celeron 440, 1.5g of ram, & 160g of memory.  it came with ubuntu 8.04 on it, which i really like (or i will, once i can figure out how to download win32 codecs on it).  the whole thing cost me $225.  

jf


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## Andrew Green (Feb 27, 2009)

jarrod said:


> thanks for the replies all.  i settled on a refurb i got with a celeron 440, 1.5g of ram, & 160g of memory.  it came with ubuntu 8.04 on it, which i really like (or i will, once i can figure out how to download win32 codecs on it).  the whole thing cost me $225.
> 
> jf




Upgrade to 8.10, it should search for and install them for you when you try to run a file.

System -> Software sources -> Updates.  Change the release upgrade field to "Normal Releases"

Or, on 8.04 or 8.10 open up a terminal and "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras", you might need to turn on a few software sources first though (System -> Software sources ->turn on everything under Ubuntu software and third party)

Oh, and this might help: http://ubuntuguide.org/


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## crushing (Feb 27, 2009)

Andrew Green said:


> Upgrade to 8.10, it should search for and install them for you when you try to run a file.


 
Andrew,  I was curious about this.  I installed 8.10 because it was the latest, but after reading about installing various applications I was wondering if I should have installed 8.04 because of its status as a "Long Term Support" release.  Would there be any reason an individual may want to go with the LTS release?  I see the Ubuntu website says it's "ideal for large deployments".


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## Andrew Green (Feb 27, 2009)

As an individual, probably not.  But if you had 500 machines to keep updated, you might be a little more careful in how, and how often you upgraded them


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## jarrod (Feb 27, 2009)

major thanks man, i'd rep you if i could.

jf


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