(OLD) (ARCHIVED) Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Mike Walsh]

Point taken, David..!

Yes, I shall have to have a re-think on that one, too. Thanks for reminding me; it simply hadn't yet occurred to me. I've been familiarising myself with the hardware, this last few days; haven't had that much time to do owt else thus far.....


Mike.

[p310don]

Mike - boot up a modern Pup, install Virtualbox, and then play with the older ones in that. Voila, best of both worlds

[Mike Walsh]

[greengeek]

[nic007]

Easy. I've done some fairly recent kernel swops for older Puppy's. Only inconvenience was first startup and time lost waiting for x to load. You should get good results after the swap by booting pfix=nox and then running xorgwizard and xwin. Once your settings are saved the delay at starting X to desktop will be shorter.

[Colonel Panic]

My local computer shop put a machine together for me this week after my old one failed unexpectedly (it only cost me £20 and I got eIght months' use out of it, so not bad at all and I'm not complaining).

I now have an Athlon II X4 (quad core) processor and 6GB of RAM (5.58 indicated ) to use, which is more than enough for anything I'm likely to want to do online.

[dancytron]

My faithful 1.8 Gigahertz duo core intel with 3 Gig of ram exandable to 4 bit the dust last week. I paid almost $800 for it when it was new.

For $38 plus shipping and sales tax, I got a HP 8000 elite small form factor Intel duo core 3.0 Gigahertz with 4 Gig of ram, expandable to 16, complete with Windows 7 oem license sticker.

I've defeated some annoying quirks and now are running exactly what I had before.

I'll document it in the right thread, but it will not boot grub4dos drives on usb. It was very strange and annoying since the only bootable DVD/CD I had was Windows XP Black and my old usb DVD burner has also apparently died. I had to install XP, use Universal USB Installer to make a not grub4dos Puppy thumb drive, and then install from that.

But, hard to complain for $38

edit: it may be the ext4 file system, not the grub4dos that kept it from usb booting

[Mike Walsh]

.....and further 'ramblings'.

I had a good look inside the new desktop last night. I'd removed the main 500 GB drive from the Compaq yesterday, and last night installed it before hitting the sack. It's been neatly put together, this thing; HP have definitely given some thought to how to make best use of the limited space.

The hard drive cage swivels out, after undoing just 4 screws. The 500 GB WD slots in nicely beside the 1 TB Tosh, giving me a total of 4.5 TB of internal & external storage, running @ SATA3/USB 3.0/3.1 transfer speeds. The second power lead is just sitting there, waiting; I re-used my own SATA 'data' leads. All wiring is very neatly routed out of the way, with dozens of wee clips all over the place for securing things.

-----------------------

Interestingly, this thing is using high-rated ceramic SMD (surface-mount) power caps most of the way round the motherboard, with a number of polyester SMDs and just the odd electrolytic 'leaded' variety here & there. Should make it easier to spot any 'blown' ones, some years down the line.

Despite the limited space, compared to the old tower, there still seems to be more room to work in than the old one.......probably due to the fact that everything seems so much smaller to begin with!

I'll still feel happier if I can "up" the output from the PSU; that diminutive 180W worries me, I tell you...


Mike.

[dancytron]

I just added the hard drive from my old computer to it and mine is built the same way.

No tools required. Flip up the cage with the DVD drive in it, slide the hard drive in underneath it, hook up 2 wires, flip it back down, close the case, and that's it.

A lot of nice engineering.

[Colonel Panic]

Not exactly new, but I'd like to give a reminder that it's worth checking on EBay if you're looking for hardware. After my old monitor started failing I was lucky enough to get a 22" EIZO Flexscan (model number S2202W) this week, used but in good condition and for less than I would have had to pay for a new monitor of the same size from the likes of Argos. It supposedly has a scratch on the casing but I haven't seen it yet.

[Mike Walsh]

[Mike Walsh]

Well, I'm just about now set with this new machine.....

Storage setup is now 4 TB, all internal. The 1 TB Toshie is the default installed HDD; the 3 TB is the Seagate Barracuda, which has been 'removed' from the fancy external case with USB 3.0/SATA adapter it originally came in, and is now plugged directly into the mobo's SATA3 ports.

The WD 500GB Caviar 'Blue' is now a 'spare', in case I ever need one.

RAM has been upped from 4 DB DDR4 to 8 GB DDR4 - still 2400 MHz (this is the max the custom HP board supports, though it's interesting they supplied it with a stick of 2666!) This is, I feel, a perfect amount for my use case; allows plenty of multi-tasking if necessary, and gives Openshot a good chunk of space to play with when rendering. Which leads me nicely onto my latest, and probably final purchase.....

.....an Asus GeForce GT710 GPU, with its own, dedicated, 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. Far more modern than the very basic GeForce 210 I'd purchased a few years ago, and with which I was experimenting some weeks back.....never having been able to use it in ye olde Compaq tower due to a damaged PCI-e slot. Plenty of folks have been recommending GTX 1080s and 2080s, and look at you 'gone-out' when you explain that you just want a usable GPU for every day stuff, with enough grunt for the odd mad session. Serious gamers just seem incapable of understanding anything other than their passion.....

This is one of these silent, 'passively-cooled' cards, with a large, oversized heatsink and no fan. 'Passive radiation' is the cooling method of choice, y'see. I definitely didn't want a fan anymore after playing with the 210; the teeny fan on the 210's diminutive heatsink did a fair impression of an angry hornet trying to break out and win its freedom. I wouldn't have believed it possible for something so small to create such a persistent, intrusive whine.....3 or 4 days of that, and I had to take it out, or I'd have gone bonkers!

Specs-wise, it's not much of an improvement on the Pentium 'Gold's on-die UHD 630 GPU; a few more cores, a few more execution units, slightly higher memory and base clock speeds, etc, etc. Increased performance wasn't the overall reason for the 710's purchase; I'm happy enough with the UHD 630's performance, but like all on-board graphics, it eats into system RAM for its VRAM. I wanted, essentially, to keep all 8 GB for Puppy & what I want to do, yet have a card with the same level of performance that had its own pool of dedicated RAM to play with, and which would have enough grunt to handle video rendering in Puppy.....Openshot likes to offload this stuff to the GPU whenever possible, and this thing will handle it nicely.

I think power draw was the biggest surprise. The older 210 pulls around 30W from the slot itself; the GT 710, despite having a vastly higher number of cores/execution/shader/texture units, etc, because of being built on a much smaller fab process, sips a mere 19W from that small, 180W PSU.

(Which was quite a relief, 'cos research has already shown the PSU on these HP 'mini-towers' is not easy to upgrade; not only are they a weird size to start with, but HP, being sneaky, have carefully fitted it with custom, one-off connectors, haven't they? No 20/24-pin ATX connector here; the entire board is supplied via just 4 pins, plus a 4-pin for the CPU supply.... (*Grrrr....*))

----------------------------

Overall, though, I'm satisfied with my new set-up. It'll keep me productive for quite a while to come, I feel..!


Mike.

[ndujoe1]

I transferred my data to Solid state hard drive.

[linuxcbon]

Because many PC stuff broke down, I had to buy :
Second hand stuff :
- an old USB logitech M90 mouse. (simple, practical)
- an old fujistu siemens keyboard. (simple, robust, practical)
- an old gpu card MSI GTX 750 2GD5/OCV1 , but it broke after 2 months LOL.
- an old 24" HP screen (average image quality but enough for my needs)
- some old DDR2 RAM sticks (average but enough for my needs)
And new stuff :
- a "spirit of gamer pro-h5" headset. (sound quality is bad, but it's enough for my needs).

[ndujoe1]

Mike I like your graphic logo. May I share to my friends. It is says it all and is true.