5 Aug
2006
5 Aug
'06
3:14 p.m.
Ray Arachelian wrote:
Well, "kinda" (but not really). Depends on your ambient
conditions, etc. But there is no doubt that replacing a
nice little LX or Classic with a dual Piii is a non-starter
(given the uses I put it to).
Don Y wrote:
I have a few old laptops (~400MHz) that I use for odds and
ends. This one does *just* email/WWW -- nothing else on the
machine so if something "happens" to it, I can just reload
(W98, in this case, with Firefox, TBird and Acrobat the only
things installed other than the OS itself) everything and
start over without losing anything.
I don;t let my machines talk to the outside world
(this is the
easiest way for me to keep everything 100% secure with zero
effort on my part :> ) so if I cant use the MIPS, they get
wasted. :-(
You obviously let at least one machine talk to the outside world,
after
all, how else are you reading and responding to this mailing list? :-) Yes, your LX does count as a machine, even if it's
only running at
40Mhz. :-D
LX routes traffic between two of the networks here (as well
as serving fonts, DNS, etc. for the X terminals and other
hosts). So, it runs 24/7/365 hence I want it to use the
least amount of power possible :>
I find a well secured openbsd box to be a nice secure
firewall,
NAT/router. I route my web traffic through a squid, that way I can
catch any possible rogue applications trying to talk to outside machines
over http, ftp, or smpt. Local firewalls on all the boxes help too.
Esp. on windows where you get pop ups letting you know what's trying to
talk to the outside world.
But they all require maintenance. :> I can live without
that level of connectivity for the time/effort it saves me!
(If I need to move files in/out I FTP them to/from the
laptop and let the laptop deal with actually getting them
in/out).
<shrug> I guess it depends on where you want to spend your
time. I use my machines mainly for "doing work" (CAD, EDA,
software design, etc.) so I don't want to have to spend much
time working *on* them (just like a carpenter doesn't want
to have to "service" his hammer regularly :-/ )
I had
inherited three Dell Precision 410MT's (dual Piii/600's)
and thought of replacing the LX and Classic that serve as my
routers with them. But, the size (tower-ish) and power
(not just $$$ but BTU's as well -- this is AZ so we don't
need any extra heat even in Winter!) differences between them
and the cute little SPARC boxes made this a no-brainer
decision. (I kept one of the Dells and donated the other
two to a local charity. In hindsight, perhaps I should
have lifted the memory out of them and flushed-up the one
that I kept :< )
Yup, for every watt of CPU power, you need another watt (or is it more?) to cool it. RAM is cheap these days, ~$100=1GB. So
don't fret over the
memory. There are machines I rarely power on at home for the same
reason. They're too expensive to run, so I only power them when I need to.
Exactly. I tossed my last Proliant 5500R (?) for exactly
that reason. And the fan noise. :-(
I think the next time I get my hands on a group of laptops,
I'll probably invest the time setting them up for these jobs
so I can just toss them in a desk drawer when not in use
AND can live without all the excess BTU's! (a big win
switching to a laptop for email, etc. since I no longer
have to power up a big monitor just to read mail!)