[conspire] new computer?

[paulz at ieee.org]

 When I had a Costco membership, they had a really good no hassle return policy.  

BTW,  I identified the drives without using a screwdriver.   After a couple of tries I found the key to access BIOS.  Now I have the exact models for 2 IDE drives and 1 SATA.  Still am not sure which is unhappy.

I'm not too keen on buy a "new" IDE drive.  Without opening the box, can someone tell me if I could add a 2nd SATA to the existing box.  Somehow I don't think SATA can be daisy-chained like 2 IDE drives.

Regarding computer power, it sure has changed.  My first machine was an S-100 with Z-80 processor, which i over-clocked to an amazing 5 MHz.  I think the first memory card might have been 32K.  Also 8" floppy disk drives.  It took about 2 minutes to boot CPM, launch Wordstar, and open a small text file.  Over time, processors went from 8-bit to 16-bit and finally 64-bit.  Clock speeds went from a few MHz to 100 MHz, ... but toppped out around 3GHz.  No significant increase in quite a few years.  More CPU power comes from more cores, but for the applications I run, I rarely see even 4 cores fully used.

More RAM is still a good thing because we keep using higher resolution pictures. 

Also the folks are SeaGate, SanDisk and Western Digital keep improving storage.   In past, I might have taken 1000 3MB pictures in a year.  Now they are 16MBpictures,  And GoPro makes it easy to take 10000 images in a few hours.




    On Monday, November 19, 2018, 4:09:53 PM PST, Tony Godshall <togo at of.net> wrote:  
 
 > The key to figuring out if the system is going to be anaemic is
> _research_.  This is the one fatal error I find that people purchasing
> new systems tend to make: buying something on the spot and taking it
> home, rather than writing down the make/model and any applicable options
> bundles of promising offerings, going home, and spending some time
> looking up their particulars (from a Linux perspective) on the Internet.
> One heuristic that's useful is to make a list of the constituent
> chipsets (ethernet, sound, wireless, video, etc.) and look up each such
> chip model + the word 'Linux' with a Web search engine.
...

Alternatively, if a place has a good return policy, you can buy it,
try it with a LiveUSB/LiveCD version of your distro, and return
it if it doesn't easily work.  If they ask for a reason, you can even put
a bug in whatever ear, enough people saying "doesn't work with my
favorite operating system" may eventually get vendors to improve
compatibility (but I wouldn't hold my breath)

But definitely, if you can afford it, support the vendors who sell
something you like *with Linux supported* and avoid paying for
a Windows license, directly or indirectly.

Tony

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