Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
My current computer may have yours beat. 
It is 10+ years old, and still exists purely as an experiment in reviving oldness.
Somehow I manage to run MATE and cinnamon without it being totally unusable. 
calibre loads in ~40s and I have at least 40 tabs open.
The only thing I upgraded was the RAM. Started with 256 MB  and has 2 GB now.
Streaming video seems to be a problem solely because Flash has a violent disagreement with my system/hardware/something -- and I don't care enough to try fixing it. |
My current machine is a Gateway LT4004U - and the only time in my life
that I've experienced a major reversal in Moore's law. It's a dual core
Atom N2600 @ 1.6Ghz with 1GB ram and Intel GMA 3600 graphics. I bought it
at best-buy in 2012 to replace a previous laptop that had just died. It
cost about $250 - which was all I could afford to spend and was about what
I had payed for the previous machine when it was new.
I use the Palemoon browser, a lighter weight version of Firefox, and keep
a terminal window open at all times because the browser frequently bogs
things down so badly that I have to switch to the terminal and use
"killall palemoon" to squash it.
If I have Calibre running and want to launch a browser to look up
information on a book, I have to use Midori because Firefoox or Palemoon
running at the same time as Calibre would mean waiting minutes at a time
for a stalled mouse cursor to move again.
I can stream videos from Youtube and other sites like
Gorillavid/Putlocker/Payed.to/etc. but if I download most videos, they are
usually too high of a resolution for me to play with VLC/Xine/etc in full
screen.
I really don't understand how this machine can be so bad. It has a gig of
ram which is as much as any machine I've ever owned had. I know the
GMA3600 graphics is horribly supported under Linux, but I've never had a
machine with video acceleration and have usually always been using the
VESA driver in X, so I really don't understand how that could effect
anything. I'm totally lost as to where it's processor ranks in the
pantheon of performance since I have had 20 years of just buying a new x86
machine and having it be much faster than a several year old machine that
it replaced. With the purchase of this machine, Moore's law has forsaken
me. This is significantly slower than the machine it replaced, and that
was probably purchased in 2008 or 2009?
Unfortunately, my finances haven’t allowed me to fork out for a
replacement, though I’m hoping that will change eventually. That’s why I
love seeing great potential hardware like these cheap Chromebooks in the
kind of price category that I can imagine I might one-day be able to shop
in ;-)