[geeks] Q about older PC hardware retention

[Phil Stracchino]

On 06/18/11 23:29, der Mouse wrote:
>> Just an out-of-the-blue question, but when it comes to older PC
>> hardware, I've got a couple questions:
> 
>> 1) For personal use, how old a machine would you hold on to, as
>> defined by processor age/class/generation?
> 
> For peecee hardware, probably nothing before about a Pentium 100.  And,
> as you specified, this is absent anything unusual about it that makes
> it worth keeping.

Pentium 100?  I just retired all my AthlonXP hardware.  From a
MIPS-per-watt point of view, anything older than that is pretty much a
doorstop, IMHO.  Their utility is scarcely worth powering them up.

>> 2) For donation to an end-user charity (church, homeless group,
>> battered women's shelter, etc - NOT a tech recycling charity) how old
>> a machine would you consider donating?
> 
> I'd probably ask them.  If I couldn't do that for some reason, I'd ask
> someone who knows mostly-modern Windows what the minimum that would be
> useful is.  I'd expect this to be somewhere around a P4, but I'm out of
> touch with that world - that's why I'd ask someone.

I'd donate P3/P4 or AthlonXP machines.  But they're going to want to run
a commodity OS on it, and with such an organization that's probably
going to be Windows, at this point likely Windows XP.  Anything much
older probably isn't going to be usable enough for them.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, SQL wrangler, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.