Razzu's jurassic Acer 3000 laptop is giving up... the occasional BSODs not withstanding even the hardware is failing. They've stood the test of time and given exemplary performance for the beating they got! Dust, grime, moisture...they endured it all.
It's time for an upgrade. A full fledged 4 core PC or and i5 laptop was never on the cards,more on that later. A PC with basic configuration...that was our requirement. I turned to our trusty old classifieds sites for some used stuff again :-)
I think another post is in order on "used" alone because apart from saving me some precious moolah, I am doing my bit for the environment by reusing stuff that'll otherwise end up in an electronic waste dump.
After more than a week of hard searching, I finally hit jackpot. A small shop in Abids had a stock of Dell systems handed down by some IT company and they
posted on OLX. I didn't waste time... went there with Juber today and picked up a piece.
The machine:
A pentium 4 processer clocking at 2.8ghz cooled by a loud turbine fan, on a generic 915 chipset mother board. In the memory compartment a 1gb DDR2 RAM of HYNET brand(Hynix+Dynet, lol) and a generous 80gb Seagate hard drive. By generous I mean by 2005 standards. The CD drive is the weakest link with no Dvd reader or a writer either. There are 8 USB ports but two will be in use anyway due to the missing PS/2 links. The cabinet is a rock solid clamshell model which is typical of Dell, sturdy and durable. One issue is the rather wobbly base which kindof makes it safe to keep the case in horizontal position.
I live again...
I bought a USB keyboard, a cable and hooked up the cabinet to my old 17" LG monitor. The system booted up in an impressive 30 seconds... though that's bound to change as more and more crap piles up on the hard drive. I installed some applications including VLC, Foxit and Avira free. Video playback is ok for small files though I'm yet to check HD content on it. More on the software performance later. It's satisfactory as of now...
Why go cheap?
The reason, as the title already suggests, is Economy. Why spend 20+ thousand on a sysem when you can pretty much make do with something that costs quarter as much?
Also, the needs of students aren't that many. I need a powerful system for my RAW editing, PSing and occasional video editing. Razzu on the other hand needs a computer for basic word processing, and browsing. A 2.8 gig is more than sufficient for that...hell, my little HP 2133 does well on windows 7 with a puny 1.2ghz VIA!
For:
- basic browsing
- music
- word processing
- videos
- home server
- download machine
not for:
- processor heavy tasks
- video editing
- graphics
- HD content
I think I'll get another one for Dad. One one for my cousin too...
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