My new $250 PC

[Colin]

First, my $200 Dell P4 dies, then my $50 PIII eMachines back-up PC starts getting blue screen errors. Maybe it was outdated drivers for the USB 1.0 wireless adapter and dual external hard drives. Yet, washing the drive and re-installing everything didn’t help.

So I got used PIII Gateway for $100 and added more RAM ($20, 512MB) and a wireless card ($20, 802.11g). With Task Manager, I could see the PIII often hit 100% CPU usage and 512MB page file usage ceilings. Even with the new wireless card, I still lost signal strength and dropped my Internet connection site. Then it too began crashing. (Is MS trying to move me from XP?) I couldn’t install XP SP2 or IE 7.0 on it! Finally, I couldn’t get it to boot at all. It would blue screen ½ way through boot-up. All this of course, while I am looking for writing work, a stable job, uploading resumes, networking with business people, getting directions, researching and writing local newspaper articles, renting and/or selling my townhouse, meeting new women and getting rid of my stuff online!

So I traded it up at Computer Virus Center, which is located at the local flea market, for a new black box with long blue front panel lights and a huge fan. This generic Blue Liquid box doesn’t have the MS Vista OS RAM hog. It has Windows XP, Office and Photoshop 2003, Pentium Dual Core CPU at 2.80 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB SATA hard drive with Unichrome graphics adapter for $250! (I lost $60 on the trade-in, but labor to solve my problems would have been double or triple that and I would still have the old PC). Everything is under manufacturers’ warranties.

This is a big expense for me, I usually spend about $100 each year buying a cheap PC. For writing and suffering the net, I don’t need much. I would love a powerful notebook, but at 2 grand and obsolete or wearing out in 3-5 years, the depreciation is too severe. My new wireless card always shows the best signal strength (54 mbps) and I never lose my Internet connection site! The CPUs idle at 1-3% almost all of the time. Even when I am asking it to do several things at once, they never go over 85%. Page file usage is never over 512MB. I am running Iomega Automatic Back-up to the dual external drives (now at USB 2.0) and that does rev the CPUs to 100% (but doesn’t increase page file usage). When the Back-up is running, jumping around the Internet slows down, even with Back-up priority set to “Low.” Any way to increase the page files?

RAM is much, much faster than hard drives. When the CPU goes to the hard drive for anything, PCs operate 100 times slower! Even with 512MB RAM, running XP, Office and IE forced the old PIII PCs to crawl. Although I have never seen the new dual-core CPU use more than 512MB, with 2 GB RAM, this black and blue box rarely goes to disk. It is noisy, but I love it. Finally something that can keep up with me! Now I can print, surf multiple sites, watch the news, make back-ups, open PDFs and write all at the same time.

[Guest " "]

it's amazing how much the prices on these have dropped.

[mas]

Maybe this will help...

Here is a link to NewEgg for a sale on 2 GB of desktop RAM.for $29

This was dated today, so it may not last long. But they have been running quite a few RAM specials...

$29.00 Corsair 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

[Colin]

Thanks, it is not the RAM. I removed Iomega Automatic Back-up and will try it again.

[mfk]

Colin, I use an old $250 AMD Duron processor in the kitchen, using Fedora Core 8, the darn thing works like a charm, although the documentation to install wireless cards is less than good, but it works. What it comes down to is eliminating some of the buffer sizes in the kernel so ndiswrpper would build and then making sure you have all the drivers you need in a directory where ndiswrapper can get to them.

For my big kahuna I have a Dell Dimension E 521 with an AMD X2 4800+, with a 2.0 Ghz FSB, so it is a fast machine, 2 GB of RAM and Fedora Core 4 make it totally rock. There is no real reason to use windoze unless there is a specific application requiring windoze. Even then you can look to codeweavers.com for running most MSFT apps. My graphics card, a PNY using the Nvidia 8500 GeForce chipset and 512 MB of RAM should give me plenty of room, but alas, under windoze, it is neverr enough.

When I first bought this monster, it had Windoze Media edition, I got a free upgrade to Vista, which was really bad, I have seen Vista "Ultimate" (64 Bit) take up to 100% of my dual core cpu...the OS is a total pig. At that point I decided to go to Fedora Core 4 which had some really kick *** ripping libraries on it. It was after scoring a 4.9 on the Vista scale after getting the new graphics card that I gave up. Linux is easier to configure, Firefox is Firefox and OpenOffice does all I need, including making perfect .ppt and .doc format files.

Linux cuts itself a lot of swap space, usually double physical RAM but the kernel is so small as is the window manager that going to swap is very rare, Linux, with it's small kernel is way faster, Linux started as minix, a multiuser, multitasking real time OS.

The windoze kernel was designed as a single user multitasking system, the Linux kernel was designed as a multiuser multitasking operating system. The replacement of what ended up as an XP pro machine is now a Fedora Core 4 machine running the Open Darwin interface (like OS X) and all really does well. Granted I have a heck of alot of horsepower, but this machine will broadcast class D.

I have been working with Linux as my personal OS since the early 1990's and have had nothing but great performance, yea, there is a little more tweaking involved once in a while, but the performance has been great. Fedora detects my soundcard, a PCI-X card and my tv card. These kinds of tweaks are not available to Windoze users, as windoze architechture is closed.

Personally, yea, I prefer Linux, I have friends that swear by OS X and I know tons of Windoze lovers, whatever you choose, pick your poison and learn all you can. I can actually read Linux Kernel code at this point and make kernal mods...something that can't be done in Windoze. I picked, compiled and installed my own interface, an OS X like interface (Open Darwin) although I do like Gnome...I like the fact that I can pick my interface. As far as multitasking, I have been able to do that since the days of the PII.