[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks Dennis. The only thing is I don't have time for a hobby. I should be working (writing). I can really use Windows but sometimes I think this 'fix up the junk heap' sort of stuff is my poverty mentality saying 'well, I may be poor but I sure can get good deals.'

Like I said, you get what you pay for. How good a deal it is is another matter. It's not a good deal if it doesn't work, no matter how cheap it was,

Our gay neighbor down the hall likes to shop, and comes back with stuff he doesn't need simply because it was a really good deal. It's his hobby, and he can afford it.

Some of the reviewers of the $59 dollar computer had great luck with running Windows 10.

Good.

I started out with a very small computer (40GB harddrive) and a friend told me it could handle Xubuntu. So that's what I started out with. As my computers got more powerful I stuck with Xubuntu because I love its simplicity.

I got Xubuntu because the mother of a friend passed along an ancient Fujitsu netbook she has upgraded from, but didn't just want to throw it out.

30GB IDE4 HD, onboard ATI graphics, a Transmeta Crusoe CPU (an early attempt at power saving - Linus Torvald's first US job was working for Transmeta), and a whopping 256 MB of RAM, of which the CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP Pro SP2 installed, and took 8 minutes to simply boot. Actually doing anything took a lot longer.

I swapped in a 40GB IDE drive from a failed laptop and began hacking. I wiped the drive, repartitioned, and set it up to multi-boot, installing Win2K Pro SP4 (which would actually run in it more or less acceptably), Xubuntu 12.04, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS.

Xubuntu had problems. It installed fine, but was snail slow. Posters on teh Ubuntu forums thought too much Gnome had crept in, and recommended what I did - install from the Minimal CD to get a working CLI installation, then use apt-get to add only what was needed. I installed Lxde as the lightest weight GUI that would behave as desired (Think XFCE with one panel.) That brought along Xorg as a dependency.

Installed on a Ext4 file system, performance was bearable. Puppy Linux, also on Ext4, flew, but Puppy was intended for low end hardware. I set both Linuxes up to see each other's filesystems, and spent time setting things up so that there was one copy of really large apps shared between them.

The fundamental limit was disk I/O, and IDE4 was a motherboard limitation. Really large apps loaded slowly. I didn't even try to run a current Firefox.

It was mostly an exercise to see what performance I could wring out of ancient hardware without throwing money at it. I haven't even booted it in months at this point.

I have Bodhi on one computer. Love the concept: put on only what you want.

I haven't looked at Bodhi, but as mentioned, you can do similar things with Ubuntu.

[quote]That's very cool, however look what I found. Rather than tinkering with the $59 computer, I found this Lenovo desktop. It's got 8GB RAM Windows 10 pro already installed. I really should be working, not tinkering. I almost bought it but I wanted to ask your opinion before I did.

Here's the comparison between the two.

<...>

No comparison. Assuming it works as claimed, you get a working Win10 Pro installation with adequate RAM and decent CPU. I'd still want to put an SSD in the mix, but you don't have to to use it.

For $24 dollars more this seemed like a no-brainer. What do you think? Thanks.

P.S. The only thing that bothered me was no reviews.

Lack of reviews are an issue. I'd likely go for it, but I've had more practice dealing with hardware.

Agreed, though - you should be writing. Writers I know talk about "vacuuming the cat", which refers to things done to avoid writing. You don't want fiddling with old hardware to be your excuse for not writing.
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Dennis