Breathing new life into a tired old box

[Jonesy]

I like old technology, for many reasons and of course cost is a big incentive. I have four machines here all cobbled together using salvaged components. The fastest is an AMD 2000XP on a K7S5A mobo with a Gig of ram. The lowliest being a 1.5 Gig Celeron on a Gigabyte board of some description with only 512Mb of ram so you can see we are talking OLD !!. Almost a decade old in that particular case.

I recently updated the latter with PCLinuxOS 2010 MInime KDE4 and WOW !!. I was amazed at how fast this old clunker had suddenly become. It was like a shot of digital steroids for this old baby. So impressed was I that I spent the rest of the day installing and configuring the same on two other machines with the same excellent result. I have kept the Minime 2009 KDE 3.5 install on my main machine simply because it is already just to darned perfect to mess with.

Networking, always the bane of my life, worked out of the box. The amount of configuration was minimal, basically just a case of choosing my shared folders and setting their permissions, that was it. Same with printers. I have what is probably one of the most Linux unfriendly printers, a Lexmark X1100 AIO but it worked perfectly, as did the scanner, and it works seamlessly as a networked printer too. Tv capture card, USB devices, everything works out of the box as I have come to expect.

I have used PCLinuxOS since 2007 when I was hopping from one distro to the other looking for one that would just work properly and consistently and was knocked out by the sleek look and stabillity of the 2007 release.

I still prefer KDE 3 but thats because it's what I am acustomed to having used it for so long, but I have to admit, PCLInuxOS and particularly the new 2010 KDE4 release is streets ahead of anything else. For me its the only game in town.

[Ramchu]

Nice +1 

PCLinux did it for me also !

[Yoyo]

Lovely testimonial, thanks for sharing.

[T6]

one recommendation, keep that athlon xp clean and properly maintained, most of those models worked very hot, 60°c more or less

the funny thing is that the xp cpu you have there is as fast or faster than my semprom at 1600mhz