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<div>When I had a Costco membership, they had a really good no hassle return policy. <br><div><br><div><div><div>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.<br><div><br>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.<br></div></div><div><br><div>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.<br><div><br><div>More RAM is still a good thing because we keep using higher resolution pictures. <br><div><br><div>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.<br><div><br><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div></div><div><br></div>
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On Monday, November 19, 2018, 4:09:53 PM PST, Tony Godshall <togo@of.net> wrote:
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<div><div dir="ltr">> The key to figuring out if the system is going to be anaemic is<br clear="none">> _research_. This is the one fatal error I find that people purchasing<br clear="none">> new systems tend to make: buying something on the spot and taking it<br clear="none">> home, rather than writing down the make/model and any applicable options<br clear="none">> bundles of promising offerings, going home, and spending some time<br clear="none">> looking up their particulars (from a Linux perspective) on the Internet.<br clear="none">> One heuristic that's useful is to make a list of the constituent<br clear="none">> chipsets (ethernet, sound, wireless, video, etc.) and look up each such<br clear="none">> chip model + the word 'Linux' with a Web search engine.<br clear="none">...<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Alternatively, if a place has a good return policy, you can buy it,<br clear="none">try it with a LiveUSB/LiveCD version of your distro, and return<br clear="none">it if it doesn't easily work. If they ask for a reason, you can even put<br clear="none">a bug in whatever ear, enough people saying "doesn't work with my<br clear="none">favorite operating system" may eventually get vendors to improve<br clear="none">compatibility (but I wouldn't hold my breath)<br clear="none"><br clear="none">But definitely, if you can afford it, support the vendors who sell<br clear="none">something you like *with Linux supported* and avoid paying for<br clear="none">a Windows license, directly or indirectly.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Tony<div class="ydp43cbe2d2yqt2498170927" id="ydp43cbe2d2yqtfd32713"><br clear="none"><br clear="none">_______________________________________________<br clear="none">conspire mailing list<br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br clear="none"></div></div></div>
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