I’ve
described how to refurbish mature
computers in several articles. The emphasis has been on machines in the four to ten year
old range — Pentium IV’s, D’s, M’s, III’s and Celerons.
But what if you have a really
old computer, like a Pentium II, I, or even a 486? Can you use it for
anything worthwhile? A vintage distro named Damn Small Linux answers
“yes.” This article describes DSL and tells
how to make 1990’s computers useful again. Screenshots follow the
article.
WARNING:
Some people feel that playing with computers more than a decade old is
nothing short of idiotic. If you agree, stop reading now and save
yourself the trouble of composing a clever flame. Those brave enough to enter the WABAC Machine, please continue:
Mr. Peabody and his pet boy Sherman enter the WABAC (pronounced “Way Back”) computer to fix history.
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Cartoon Show, 1960. (Image: Wikipedia)
Background
486’s, PentiumI’s, and II’s ran Windows 3.1,
95, 98, 98SE,ME, and 2000. The
trouble with refurbishing any of these older versions of Windows is
that you can’t securely connect them
to the Internet. Microsoft doesn’t
supply security fixes and they’re long out of support. Most anti-malware vendors
don’t support them. If you find an anti-malware product
thatruns on them, itoverwhelms the CPU. It’s no longer practical to run internet-connected, pre-XP versions of Windows.
Windows alternatives are the way to go to. This article
describes one of several Linux distributions that fills the bill. Other possibilities
for include BSD variants (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD), DOS descendants (FreeDOS, OpenDOS), and other small operating systems (MINIX,Breadbox Ensemble).
Damn Small Linux is a “turnkey” distro. It’s convenient because it bundles everything you need right
in the initial install. Another way to go is to take a bare-bones Linux
distro like Tiny Core and
build it up into the system you want. This takes more effort but ensures that only apps you need consume resources. The choice
is yours.
Keep in mind that old computers simply don’t have the
horsepower for some tasks people use computers for today. Video?
Movie-making? Lots of open windows? Web site
generators? Nope. Limitations in mind, here’s what old hardware offers:
| Pentium: | Produced: | Processor Speeds: | Typical Memory: | Maximum Memory: |
| 486 |
1989 to 2007 |
16 mhz to 100 mhz |
2 to 16 M |
varies widely |
| I andI-MMX |
1993 to 1999 | 60 mhz to 300 mhz | 16 to 64 M | 128 M |
| II | 1997 to 1999 | 233 mhz to 450 mhz | 64 to 128 M | 256 M |
| III | 1999 to 2003 | 450 mhz to 1.4 ghz | 128 M to 512 M | 512 M to 1 G |
Sources: Wikipedia,
Tom’s Hardware, personal
experience. “Typical Memory”
refers to how much memory you’ll typically encounter in
donated computers. “Maximum
Memory” is the hardware limit for the maximum allowable memory.
Computersvary a bit in maximum memory by manufacturer; common
maximums are listed. Celerons are excluded from this chart because the word is a brand name for
“value computers” that indicates nothing about processor speed.
Pentium III’s and earlier have no resale
value. You can get one free from friends, family,co-workers, Freecycle, or Craigslist. You might even have onein your own basement or attic.
Enter Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux
or DSL was released in 2003 to create a
Linux operating system for older hardware. It’s based on Knoppix/Debian technology. While your mileage may
vary, the basic DSLsystem
requirements are:
- 486 or better processor
- 8 M memory for the command line inteface (16 M recommended)
- 16 M memory for the graphical user interface (24 M recommended)
- The DSL download is 50 M
DSL’s
targeted “sweet spot” is:
- High-end 486’s
- Pentium I’s
- Pentium I MMX’s
- Low-end
Pentium II’s
If you have a more capable machine — a Pentium II with at least 128M or a Pentium III — I’d recommend Puppy Linux. Puppy supports abroader range of bundled applications than DSL and is more
user-friendly. Read my Puppy review here.
With a Pentium III with at least 256M and there are dozens of distros
available to you. My favorite is Lubuntu. Read my Lubuntu
review here.
Whatever machine you have, be sure to top out its
memory. Memory is a critical resource thatlimits what you can
do with
these old machines. Bump
a P-I MMX up from 32M to 128M, or top out a P-II with 256M, and you’ve
acquired a whole new universe of possibilities. Used
memory is cheap. Just like the old computers themselves, it’s often
free if you can find it. If not, local
computer shows, eBay, and refurbishing organizations like Free Geek are excellent sources.
How Does DSL Do It?
How on earth does DSL get Linux — with a GUI — to run on
an old P-I or a 486?
DSL disables all unnecessary daemons or
services. It gives you a tool to directly manage daemons. Bundled applications
were chosen specifically for their stingy resource use.
DSL will run entirely from memory if you have at
least 128M.
This
eliminates slow CD, hard disk, or USB access and executes the system at
in-memory speeds. This has a big performance impact because the drives on older computers were much slower than they are
today. Remember 2x and 4x CD-ROMs?
Efficiency means
trade-offs, of course. Many of DSL’s apps are a bit geeky rather than easy to use. The default GUI is Fluxbox,
a lightweight interface configured by text files. Fluxbox offers some
eye candy but has limited support for graphical icons. My feeling is
that while DSL
performs miracles in reviving older computers for hobbyists,
it isn’t appropriate for the typical “computer consumer” or end user.
Flexibility
DSL adapts well to the
system you have, rather than imposing hardware requirements. This is
critical because old hardware may have missing or broken components. Maybe your system doesn’t have a working
CD, or maybe the disk drive is flaky. I had a Gateway
Pentium II on which the USB ports never worked. (The USB 1.x
specification was not entirely successful.) DSL works
around the hardware you’re missing.
DSL
boots from any bootable device: Live
CD, business card CD, USB memory stick or pen drive, IDE compact flash
drive, hard disk, zip drive, floppies, and more. Likewise, it stores
data to any writeable device. You can run DSL stand-alone or
under Windows as an embedded “guest OS” using the QEMU
emulator. So you can run DSL from the disk of a Windows computer
without repartitioning.
If you install DSL to disk, you can choose either the frugal install or a full install. The frugal install simply copies the Live CD files to disk. This gives you the speed of hard disk coupled with a very easy
install. DSL’s full install is a
traditional Debian disk install. DSL also runs from a USB pen drive.
What You Can Do With It
Ok, so you run DSL on a low-end computer. What can you do
with it? It won’t do everything today’s computers can, yet you can perform a surprising range of useful tasks.
DSL 4.4.10 is the current release, available since late 2008. Here’s what it bundles:
| Windows Interface |
FluxBox, Joe’s Window Manager (JWM) |
| Browsers |
Dillo, Netrik, FireFox |
| Office |
SIAG spreadsheet, Ted word processor with spell checker, Xpdf PDF viewer |
| Text Editors |
Beaver GUI text editor, Nano, Vim |
| Email |
Sylpheed |
| File Managers | emelFM, DFM |
| Images | Xzgv picture viewer, Xpaint image editor, mtPaint raster graphics editor |
| Instant Messaging |
Naim, a AIM, ICQ, and IRC client |
| Voice Over IP (VoIP) |
Gphone |
| Music and Video |
XMMS (mp3, ogg, mpeg, cd audio) and mp321 and ogg123 |
| FTP |
AxyFTP FTP client, and BetaFTPD FTP server |
Other apps include: MS Office Viewer, Postscript Viewer, Midnight
Commander, Microcom, Bash Burn (CD Burning App), Monkey web server,
VNCviewer, Rdesktop, Sqlite (a small and fast SQL database engine),
Telnet client, Nano (a Pico Clone), and Xbase utilities (Xcalc
etc.).
DSL supports Wi-Fi, USB devices, and PC cards. It comes with lightweight system administration tools. Its
system monitor displays system statistics — memory and CPU use — in
the upper right-hand corner of the screen at all times. This
information is helpful on resource-constrained computers. The
display is unobtrusive because it appears in a small, lightweight font.
A DSL feature called MyDSL
enables you
to easily install applications from the DSL software
repositories. Debian’s Advanced Packing Tool (APT) is included.
You have to enable it first by following the link to Menu -> Apps -> Tools -> Enable Apt. Then you can use apt-get to add more applications.
DSL Versus Other Distros
DSL occupies a different niche than other lightweight Linuxes. It was
designed, tested and run on old computers. It retains support
for many old devices. Try running current Linux distros on
machines from the 1990’s and you’ll come to appreciate this problem right
away.
DSL runs the 2.4 Linux kernel, instead of today’s 2.6 kernel. For those who object that “this isn’t
current software,” keep in mind that we’re talking 1990’s computers. They often aren’t capable of running
current software. The
2.4 kernel retains support for legacy
devices that 2.6 dropped since it came out in 2003. DSL also supports
the older SYSLINUX booter as well as ISOLINUX for computers that won’t
boot the latter.
Most current distros
that run on resource-limited equipment do not test on old hardware. Examples are Lubuntu and
Tiny Core Linux. Lubuntu was first released in 2010
and
has few if any users beneath the P-III range. Tiny Core 1.0 was
released in early 2009.
Puppy Linux supports both 2.6 and 2.4 kernels and some enthusiasts run it
on the old machines DSL targets. But most Puppy users have high-end
P-II’s or better.
What you really have to decide here is whether
you’re
looking for a distro with limited resource requirements, or whether you
need one that specifically supports old computers as well. These are
two distinct goals. DSL is your best bet for computers from the 1990’s.
Here’s a comparison based solely on resource. The first line below shows “best use” based on
processors, while the second indicates best use based on the memory size —
DSL-N
DSL has a larger, more current sister product called DSL-N. DSL-N weighs in at about a 95 M download and bundles a correspondingly larger group of applications.
DSL-N runs the 2.6 Linux kernel and includes the GTK+ widget toolkit
Version 2. It minimally requires a 200 mhz Pentium processor with 64 M
of memory. It targets P-II and P-III computers.
DSL-N’s bundled applications include: the
2.6.11 kernel and modules, Mozilla Suite 1.7.12 (browser, mail, irc,
etc.), Mplayer 3.3.5 audio and video, Leafpad 0.7.9 editor/notepad,
Abiword 2.2.7 wordprocessor, Gnumeric 1.4.3 spreadsheet, gTFP 2.0.18
ftp client, gaim 0.77 IM client, Xpdf 3.0.0 pdf viewer, Emelfm 0.9.2
file manager, Xpaint 2.7.6 paint program, and Cups 1.1.14 printing.
The Fate of Small Distros
By now, I imagine some readers are nearly apoplectic. But it’s no longer supported!! True.
The DSL project is dormant. DSL is no longer actively
developed or maintained.
The immediate cause of DSL’s demise was a personality conflict
among the leadership (Robert Shingledecker went on to found Tiny Core Linux). But in falling inactive DSL follows the fate of many retro Linux distributions.
Why? If you target older hardware, eventually your
project is more or less complete. You can’t evolve the software forward
because newer Linux software won’t support older hardware. And
you can’t add more software to the distribution or it is no longer
lightweight. Your distro becomes static.
The population of old hardware shrinks over time. Seven or eight years
ago picking up a free Pentium I and making it useful was exciting,
but today, well, you might score a free Pentium III. Maybe even a P-IV. Why play with a P-I if you could as
easily get a machine two generations newer?
DSL’s popularity shrinks as
the hardware it targets slips deeper into history. DSL once was
among the world’s top ten most popular Linux distros at Distrowatch.
Today the action for small Linuxes has shifted to distros like Puppy and Lubuntu,
ranked 8th and 16th as of June 2011. They target P-IV’s, P-III’s, M’s, and D’s. Today this is the sweet spot
of computer refurbishing.
The DSL team tried to address this natural progression by going
upscale
with DSL-N. But in contrast to DSL’s huge popularity,
DSL-N never caught on.
The Bottom Line
DSL is what it is. It’s not supported. It won’t change or improve. Yet it plays a useful role in providing a proven, turnkey
Linux for computers from the 1990’s: 486’s, P-I’s, P-I
MMX’s, and P-II’s.
You can’t expect to run current software on these old computers. The Linux kernel, developer toolkits, and many
applications have moved on. An operating system that specifically
addresses and supports these old systems is what you need.
DSL is one solution. It’s complete and convenient. Put it
on an
old Windows box and you have a secure, useful system. You can use it for word processing, email, IM and chat,
spreadsheets, personal databases,
and game playing. It can be your “crash box” for
suicide surfing and unconstrainted testing. It can serve as a
secondary box for the basement, garage,
or rec room, or as a backup if your main computer goes on the fritz.
And
finally, there is this: it may be old, but it’s still a free
computer, with all the discovery and learning that
offers.
DSL is fun! If you’ve got an old box lying around, try it. You’ll learn something while making that creaky hardware freaky.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Howard Fosdick (President, FCI) is an independent consultant who
supports
databases and operating systems. His hobby is refurbishing computers as
a form of social work and environmental contribution. Read his other articles here or email him
at contactfci at the domain
name of sbcglobal (period) net.
Further Information:
| DSL Home Page |
| Community Wiki |
| The Official Damn Small Linux Book |
| Official DSL Forum (largely inactive) |
| Other Forums: LinuxForums.org, LinuxQuestions.org |
| Other Reviews: IT Reviews, TechieMoe, TechSource |
Screenshots
All the screen snapshots you see here were taken with DSL’s built-in “X Window Snapshot” utility.
The first screenshot is the DSL desktop. It shows the default Window manager, FluxBox.
DSL’s desktop is not well designed for visibility. For example, the icons
at the bottom of the screen have a thin black font on gray
background.
The menuing system (not shown) also features black on gray shaded
background. The icons in the top left-hand corner of the screen
have labels with special background around them, since they wouldn’t be
visible otherwise.
System statistics are dynamically posted in
the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Immediately after system
start-up, 19 processes are running, using only 25.9 M of real memory,
and 1% of a single-core 2 ghz P-IV CPU. Now, that’s a
light system! Having these system stats always visible on-screen in this
unobtrusive manner is a big plus when working on resource-constrained
systems.
This screen shows a typical group of applications in use. They
include Firefox (aka Bon Echo) with 5 tabs open, the fast simple Dillo browser
hidden underneath, the emelFM file manager, and a terminal window.
Total real memory: 114 M, with 36 processes running! When the graphics
weren’t being refreshed, CPU use idled at less than 5%.
This last screenshot shows some of DSL’s office applications. Here I
have opened the TED gui word processor, the MSDoc File Viewer and
Converter, and the SIAG spreadsheet. The MyDSL Browser is in the upper
right-hand corner of the screen. It allows you to easily download and
install more applications from the DSL software repository. In the
upper left-hand corner a window shows folders that hold DSL’s bundled
apps, along with some of its system tools. It’s amazing how much useful software DSL crams into a 50M download.
I still keep a business-card sized CD of this with me for those Just-in-Case situations. I’ve used it many times to recover files off old PCs I’ve been dealt when they’re too old to even boot of USB Thumbdrives.
I owe a bit to this little guy. Thanks for the article!
DSL didn’t really die, the “owner” (in quotes because he didn’t do much as long as I was involved with the project) kicked everyone out. In other words, DSL didn’t die, it was killed. But, Robert Shingledecker, the main developer of DSL still actively maintains a “spinoff” distro, called Tiny Core Linux. It works very well on older systems, and is even smaller than DSL was. It’s very nice for old systems.
Sounds like a mean guy.
Tiny Core Linux is pretty IMO … nice distro seems to work well.
Do you by any chance know how they do X in Tiny Core? Last I heard, they were using KDrive, which is hopelessly outdated and not compatible with lots of hardware, or so I thought. Or I guess Xvesa will technically run on just about anything…
EDIT: I remember my incompatibility gripes were about the keyboard and mouse functionality, which broke for some older hardware of mine after Nokia submitted certain patches upstream. Xvesa always worked on whatever display, though it was crazy slow.
Edited 2011-07-12 21:47 UTC
It’s a extremely minimal build of X.org, I think. Essentially, it’s Xvesa/Kdrive/smallX, just absorbed into the mainline X.org tree, and still maintained.
But back then, it was nearly impossible to install any other applications. It was too bad, it worked so well on my K6-II 150mhz. I had to OC it to 550Mhz with some home made watercooler circuit to use Mepis.
Modern Debian can still work fine on P1 with 16mb ram, but you have to dig quite deep to clear the bloat.
That is some serious OC. Props.
The whole K6 line was great for OC ( most dramatic performance improvement from overclocking, ever) , but that is still impressive.
It was the motherboard hard set limit, I was still running at 45C on load. I could have reach 700mhz easily and still run stable. Not bad from something machined with a wood drill and using a bunch of fish tank water pump. Those water blocks still work to this day.
Too bad high school geek look to be almost extinct. Those totally absurd challenge between us/them always end up with awesome result (and even more awesome catastrophic failures).
Your memory fails you (and rather early?). K6-2 certainly started above 200. With 300 to 400 being most likely / they seemed to be by far the most popular ranges IIRC (and Celerons of such ranges also had such overclocks)
550 was a standard top model; large part of slower ones were probably a silicon mostly capable of that speed but “factory underclocked”, to fill the demand for mass-market chips; something which was and is a common practice (plus temperature isn’t everything; MHz scaling is largely an architectural limitation; even K6-2+, which shifted to 180 nm process, wasn’t capable of much above yours “easily and still run stable” …which you can’t know; nvm how “stability” has a very fluid meaning among pc hardware cargo cults)
Oh I’m so glad the kind you specifically refer to is almost extinct. Because there are plenty of HS geeks around, but today they seem to strive to do something with their computer (or with some fairly standard embedded board; or with almost run-of-the-mill robots) instead of superficialities (vs. building one in the style of, say, Galaksija) inside their computer.
That, and it’s nice to be able to ask for (and readily get) an after-market cooler which is primarily as quiet as possible (one near which it would be easy to focus, one which won’t get in the way of doing things with a computer) without getting the looks from salesmen like they have just seen an alien; without their surprised requests for clarification, without experiencing how hard the cogwheels inside of them are working when confronted with an entirely alien way of thinking about computers. And still getting IMHO grotesquely (vs. the requests) loud one, out of limited selection available (primarily targeted at “enthusiasts”)
Exactly! I have never been a fan of projects meant to revive old computers because of that. The second reason is that I have never kept a computer for longer than 3 years. Else my house would look like a computer museum. 4 notebooks and 5 desktops since 2002.
So much for sustainability, I guess…
OK, but I have always sold them very cheap, so I suppose I have helped a few people.
This is where something like arch linux is much more useful and more customizable to actually run in this kind of environment. (At least IMO)
Isn’t Arch i686?
Well the originaly Pentium Pro should qualify as an i686 I guess it won’t work for anything older then that, but my 486 cpu was hardly even able to run Windows 95 at the time.
The PPro was the original i686 architecture, aka P6. The P2, P3, Core, and Core2 CPU architectures are variations on the P6 core. The P4 was completely different.
I can second that. I tried DSL and then Arch Linux on an old Pentium II notebook. It had 128 MB of RAM. I had to buy a PCMCIA card for ethernet (€ 10 ;-)).
DSL did succeed to run, however it had some nasty quirks and, most importantly, the selection of applications is quite pure. After that quite joyless experience I decided not to give up the machine but instead try Arch.
With Arch Linux, I had really good performance, using fluxbox window manager with Nautilus as file browser, Epiphany as browser, Abiword for word processing. It ran really well. Web browsing was smooth and you could even listen to songs on Youtube. RAM usage was exceptionally low!
In conclusion, it was a nice experience to see that I can use my main operating system also in this special scenario. I thought that DSL would naturally be a better fit, but it had many shortcomings that Arch did not share. I did not perceive any disadvantage in using Arch.
Note that Arch Linux, however, will not run on the 486.
Edited 2011-07-12 11:27 UTC
Not a flame… I am fascinated by the subject and a hobby-tinkerer myself.
Every time an article of this sort is printed, one of the issues raised in the flames that you sought to preempt is power consumption. Is it cost effective or “green” (man, I have come to hate that word) to run an older unit with all of the advances in power technology?
There is also the question how much of a demand is there for such a computer (a power guzzler with a DSL desktop and no horsepower) outside of the hobby field? I don’t think very much, although feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
As it stands, I recycle much of what I come across, retaining only the newer stuff to tinker with. I have tried offering older systems for free (with Puppy, DSL, etc…) with no takers. While it kills me to take a perfectly working computer (which if you think about it, is a really amazing and sophisticated device) and turn it into scrap, the lack of a more compelling option makes it so.
Even if the prognosis was more positive, it seems like a stronger case would be made for a unit to be repruposed for use outside of the paradigm of desktop computer. Certainly the obvious is understood – print/file/media server, internet router, home automation server, etc…
But what else? I’ve had some ideas, mainly surrounding reducing the footprint of the case by eliminated hardware from the scanario. One idea was to build a motherboard (with integrated everything) and a compact power supply into a desk. now only a monitor, mouse and keyboard would need to be visible. In this scenario, a thin-client solution would be probable, so it ultimaltely would still be a “desktop” in one sense. The value-add here would be no visible computer in the room.
I’d love to see an article reviewing some of the things that people have accomplished using older PC hardware, with a focus on thinking outside the box. Maybe if I get some time I’ll research it myself.
Actually, you’re not the only one who keeps wondering about that. Very old PCs might not support ACPI at all, and even if they did there is a high likelyhood that it’s very barebones. And these old PCs eat huge amounts of energy even without any extra devices connected to them whereas you can get a light modern PC running fine with as little as 120W PSU.
So, if the old PC is actually used a lot wouldn’t it be more cost-efficient to get a light, modern PC instead and save on the electricity bill itself?
What? I couldn’t hear you over the whirr of the fans of my workstation, HTPC, server, and Xbox, while my car is running outside to get the airco going before I drive off to do some groceries down the street.
Good point, but this remains a true question. Even if an old computer consumes 3x as much power as a new computer, it may still cost more to recycle it and buy a new one than to make it run for a few more years.
If we count in energy, let’s assume that a computer costs 1 GJ* to produce and 2 GJ to recycle. During its service, its average power consumption is 30W (counting the time during the year where it’s shut down in the average). Now, 3 years after, we have a new computer, which has same production and recycling costs, but this time consumes 10W.
Keeping the old computer for 6 years : 9GJ
Changing computer after 3 years : 10GJ
The computer which consumes three times less power (which is pretty nice for three years of hardware evolution) loses, given sufficiently high production and recycling costs.
I’d love to see someone do this calculation with actual numbers from computer manufacturers.
—
* 1 GJ = 300 kWh, for those who prefer these units
Edited 2011-07-12 08:50 UTC
I don’t know how applicable that is. After all, new PCs are crammed out anyways all the time, regardless of whether or not you’re buying one. Should the energy spent on manufacturing one be counted on it? And is the energy spent the same for all PCs manufactured anyways? I honestly don’t know.
The “PCs are produced anyway” argument is a bit of a perverse one. As weakly linked to each other as they are nowadays, offer is still supposed to follow demand to some extent. If people in large number tried to make their PCs last longer, we would produce less new PCs as a long-term result, since they would sell less.
As for the cost argument, however, I certainly agree that all computers are probably not equal from a production/recycling point of view. The question is, can we approximate these costs for all of them with a weighted average cost ? Or is this model not precise enough ?
As I said, someone with the proper data and good knowledge of statistics should work on this production/recycling cost problem. As it stands, we can argue all we want, but still cannot tell which of our intuitions is right. Your guess is as good as mine, as they say.
Edited 2011-07-12 11:37 UTC
Indeed, it would be really nice to see some actual, in-depth research on it. I simply do not have enough knowledge of these things to be able to make any meaningful estimations, I’m simply throwing questions in the air.
Another related issue is the method of disposal for abandoned electronics and the envionmental impact of that. How much winds up in landfills, and what is the procetag on PCBs leeching into the water supply? And who can forget the stories about “recycling” programs that involve burning electronic waste to reclaim valuable metals? What is the impact there?
There are many factors beyond actual power consumption from the wall from a “green” (uhgh!) perspective.
True economists turn this into numbers, declaring it’s a loss of (natural) capital.
I have too much humanity left to do that job
@Neolander… Stay tuned. I’ve already written an article on this topic but it probably won’t be posted for a couple months. Meanwhile, thank you for your many perceptive comments, from which I’ve learned a lot. — Howard Fosdick
Edited 2011-07-12 20:36 UTC
If 1GJ = 300kWh then at 15c/kWh that is $45 for my rate. In China it would be way less but then we all pay for that in their CO2 and other.
And why is recycle 2x as much, the PCBs are likely (sadly) hand disassembled in Bangladesh or Chinese backyards. Most of the weight of PCs is plain steel, aluminum or plastic, recycling the bulk metal should be low.
A newer PC that is more integrated and has less components, comes in smaller package and retails for lower price almost certainly uses far less energy in manufacture and recycle as well as in use. So energy to manufacture is likely a near constant % of the manufacture cost (or they’d go broke). I’d hazard a guess that a $40 mobo for me has only $1 of energy and a few $ of labor cost in it. The chips and case probably same rates. The info is probably out there though.
After 3 years of use, it is reasonable to think about moving on. Just as incandescent bulbs are going the way of the dodo (by law in US and EU), perhaps most all energy clunkers should be retired since energy costs are going up as fast as PC energy use can go down.
I wish more PC stores would stock something like the tiny mini-box picoPSU that can plug directly into the mobo ATX connector. These are close to 95% efficient and can handle up to 150W and let you shrink a basic PC down to the size of the motherboard and a few cm thick.
I just replaced my wife’s 140W 20″ CRT with an 20″ LED display, uses 14W, that will pay for itself every year. Shame that the CRT looks so much better for TV though and still could last many more years.
In the free download book “Without the hot air” by Prof David MacKay, there is a good analysis of energy costs for almost anything you can think of. Watts, calories, BTUs are really all equivalent. The market more or less can trade $.. for any of those within reason.
Depends on how long: you forget to take into account the energy spent to make the new PC.
The only problem with that last bit is that, for some people, amortization of cost is not a realistic option. For many, to keep a computer that they have already or can acquire cheaply and not spending, at minimum, several hundred dollars on a new computer makes a BIG difference to their bottom line.
Even in cases that are not so dire it may not be so attractive to spend a chunk of money today to save comparatively trivial amounts on the electric bill. Especially if they don’t use the computer for much and the productivity gains to be expected are minimal.
In these cases, where productivity gains and long term financial savings are not a suitable carrot, what would be the motivator? We’re back to the “green” arguments again, and as your discussion with Neolander is revealing, those are murky waters.
Finally, from the tinkerer perspective, it seems natural to make use of what you can find. Older, power hungry desktops are easily obtained. New, power efficient hardware, not so much. If I had to fork out bucks for every experimental idea that I wanted to mess around with I would give up the idea altogether. There is also a satisfaction (and dare I say beauty) that comes with taking something that already exists and repurposing it rather than destroying it.
Pentium III, 256MB RAM laptop with Damn Small Linux. Runs fine. Problem is when you try to browse the web… No matter how lightweight your browser is (with GUI at least), it’s unusable for me. Not to mention using Flash and playing around with YouTube video clips
Too slow for WINE and MS Office. It’s fine to use text editor or Abiword (which I have no use). For developers maybe? So far no use for my old computer, unfortunately.
The 486 line of CPUs topped out at 133 MHz, not 100. The AMD 486DX4-133 was the top-of-the-line CPU in 1995/96. That CPU was in the first computer I ever bought myself. Even had 32 MB of RAM.
You just reminded me of the long and drawn out discussions I used to have with my geek friends back in high school, regarding 486 vs Pentium. I was the poor kid with the 486 SX50 laptop with 8MB RAM, they all had Pentium desktops with 16MB or more, and were shocked that I could run Doom without lag just as they did. Of course that had little to do with number-crunching, something that their Pentiums would spank my 486 on, but all we ever did was play games and dial up to BBSes and Compuserve.
Man, I miss the 90s!
“Poor kid with a laptop” (even a rather slow one), in the 90s, doesn’t seem to parse over here…
I didn’t think I would have to elaborate, sorry. My estranged biological father bought a used laptop and mailed it to me in my senior year of high school, as a sort of “I’m still in your life, acknowledge me!” kind of thing. I have no idea how much he paid for it, but I felt extremely lucky to even have a computer at that time. I spent every dime of the money from my part time job upgrading that thing for the first few months I had it.
All my friends with their custom built PCs were from the wealthy side of the tracks, so it felt good even being in their league, regardless of the source. Plus I could fit it in my backpack and ride my bike to whichever friend’s house was hosting the gaming sessions, since I was the only one who didn’t have a car. Fun times!
No reason to be sorry, I figured it was probably some kind of handed down scenario.
It’s just about slight comedic effect of seemingly somewhat contradictory “poor kid with a laptop in the 90s”, particularly in the context of international forum ;p (for just one example: with my part of the woods – a fairly typical ex-Comecon country with shock of the 90s (but still one of more decent places to live), EU member a decade later – PCs in general can be hardly seen as a thing of the 90s; laptops, definitely only 2nd half of “noughties”; available part time jobs, a car, what are those?
)
http://www.connochaetos.org/wiki/
The same developers as the old deli linux
Based on ArchLinux recomplied for i586
My regular Arch installs use less than 12Mb booted to CLI and 40 Booted to Icewm or FVWM2 for instance. Room for a light browser like dillo or Links and so on!
Another use for DSL is turning those old laptops with a still functioning LCD into a digital picture frame:
http://sacbhale.net/dpf.shtml
Must burn fossil fuels faster!!(?) ~3 million years of production burned every year is not fast enough!!(?)
(seriously, while getting a long use out of computers as computers is certainly worthwhile, digital picture frames in themselves seem like icons of few things wrong with us; hey, fitting they usually show… us ;p )
A 486 with a CRT screen will cost far more in the long term than a more modern machine with an LCD screen due to electricity costs.
When you consider that P4 desktops and 17″ LCDs are throw away items in western countries there is absolutely no point maintaining old machines except as a hobby.
Giving someone a 486/PI/P2 is like donating a gas guzzling 1950s car. Generous in theory but totally impractical.
No one said you have to use a crt with the 486. I don’t even know anyone who still has one.
You have no choice. Most 486 computers had only 1-4MB of video ram (with a VESA/ISA video card slot). They cannot support anything except a low resolution CRT (if you can even find one that works).
Nonsense. It does not require more video memory to plug in a relatively modern LCD via a standard VGA port and run it at 640×480. Yes it’s below the optimal resolution for the device, but if power consumption is your goal I doubt you care.
Yeah right.
So what’s the probability that someone who is so poor that they are still using a 1991-1994 vintage computer just happens to have a spare LCD monitor and VGA adaptor cable lying around?
Close to zero.
It is hard to even find a working CRT monitor. I haven’t seen one for sale for at least three years.
I still have two, taking up space in my office floor right now. They are my standbys in case my LCD goes south.
As for whether you can use an LCD on an old computer, sure you can! If your LCD accepts a VGA input (and most still do), it can scale down to 640×480.
They don’t get thrown away. They get sold in lots and get bought by importers from third world countries like mine. P4s are sold for between 50 and a 100 USD here. Most people can’t afford newer systems so these old ones sell like hot cakes. Even servers with power hungry netburst architecture dual xeon chips are sold here. All brought down from the west. Trash yes. Useless no.
Also you are wrong about p4s not being powerful enough. P4s have about as much power as netbooks running atom CPUs and we know how popular those are.
I agree. Even if I have nothing less powerful than a Core 2 Duo T8300 (a notebook, which I am going to sell very cheap) P4s should be powerful enough to run almost every OS, including Windows 7. In the Western World we are spoiled, myself included.
In Australia most people buy white boxes with cheap noisy power supplies. They normally throw them out when the power supplies die after 4-5 years. The labour costs are far too high to repair or recycle them.
I actually said that 486s aren’t powerful enough.
P4s are quite powerful but they are hot, noisy and very inefficient – especially when combined with a CRT monitor.
AROS is ideal for these old systems! You don’t really get more lightweight and still have all the modern and “Multimedia” features we are all used to!
The same could be said of Haiku OS (and on a personal note, with none of the strangeness of AmigaOS.)
I’ve had it running on a couple of P3-800 with 512MiB of RAM with no issues for half-a-year or so.
Lucky! My old hardware all died. I tried picking up a mobo with dual PIIs on ebay but it was DOA.
The big thing with older hardware today is simply the quality of life issues, notably noise and heat and such. A slow, noisy box simply isn’t attractive compared to other more modern systems.
We had stacks of some very nice rack mounted 5-10yr old Sun SPARC and AMD machines that went to the recycler. It was hard to see them go, but today most of what they did could easily be consolidated in a VM architecture on modern hardware.
Agreed. I like the author’s idea of fun with older systems, kind of like a hobbyists viewpoint. From a larger scale viewpoint like you express it’s not practical.
Is there any danger in running an old and what looks like unmaintained DSL?
It’s so old and niche that it is not targeted. Firefox 2 could be an easy attack vector, but beside that, I don’t think. Security issues come and go. Some -are- there since decades, but it’s more likely that they are only a few years old.
A big +1 from me for mentioning SIAG – the finest office suite ever written. Before OpenOffice, before KOffice, before Gnumeric, there was Scheme In A Grid. It’s fast and relatively featureful, and my memories of its speed are from a Pentium II.