In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a ha…
via Drew DeVault's blogI am often being made fun of for using old hardware, some are even in disbelief in how I keep up with what they consider a pile of metal scrap. For reference, I’m currently daily driving a desktop computer from 2008. I was 7 years old, and I still remember the day when it became part of the house, but it was not our first computer or my first interaction with one, I was excited regardless. I knew that computers weren’t made equal, however I haven’t known the details of my computer’s specs till I acquired little more knowledge about hardware by the time I got into middle school. Fast forward to today, this is my daily driver after few upgrades and repairs:
- Intel Pentium E5700 (originally an E5200) on a ECS G31T-M7.
- 2x 2GB DDR2 RAM (originally just 2GB).
- Nvidia 9500 GT 1GB DDR2.
- 1x 80 HDD, 2x 160GB HDD, 1x 256GB SSD (originally just one 160GB HDD).
Few months ago, a good friend of mine who sympathizes with my situation kindly offered some of his old hardware: Pentium E5700, Pentium E5300 and Nvidia 8400 GS. This soon led me to go and acquire more unused PC parts. To my surprise it was easier than I imagined, there were many people willing to give the components they had laying around free of charge. I got an other Pentium E5200, an Abit IP-95 motherboard, a 450W PSU from the Pentium 4 era, 2x 1GB DDR2 RAM and 3x 512MB DDR RAM, all in working conditions. Exquisite !
Well, not fascinating nor interesting to many, but hardware of all kinds excites me (when it’s in my hands of course). I will make better use of it as value can be found and repurposed. Speaking of use, I had planned to set up a home server with the parts I collected so far, while looking for a better motherboard. Unfortunately LGA775 socket with DDR3 memory motherboards are hard to come by, and local sellers pricing is not worth considering.
Old hardware is useful, especially outside of desktop computing. Most operating systems already support their standards and vendor specific hardware, so you can run pretty much anything. I am not ditching my computers, even if I get the newest high end PC in the future.
PS: I owned other computers in the past 15 years other than my daily driver: a Thinkpad L520 which was too costly to repair, an Asus laptop with a 4th gen i3 which I handed over to my brother (it’s out of service now), and recently a cousin gave away their late 2013 Macbook Pro, and I broke the screen 3 weeks later lol.