is this a good way to go?

[jarrod]

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

 

[Shicomm]

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.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

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.

 

[Dao]

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.

 

[jarrod]

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

 

[Andrew Green]

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/

 

[crushing]

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".

 

[Andrew Green]

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

 

[jarrod]

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

jf