You're going to donate this? Seriously?

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Okay, slightly befuddled older lady, sure we can format the drive in your old tower so you can donate it to some needy person.

Hey, wait a minute, this is an AT machine... that happens to be a 486 DX2 with 8MB of memory.   Do you hate who you're donating it to THAT much?  I don't think whoever you give this too is going to be able to use it for much in the way of modern computing. If you want to donate a cheap machine, then get a netbook.

Comments

[emt-hawk.livejournal.com]

It teaches resourcefulness. like how to scavenge up more memory and use xubuntu rather than winblows.

--H

[lunatic59.livejournal.com]

I'd lay money that she just didn't want to pay the recycling fee to get rid of the POS. And, she'd probably write off the purchase price as a charitable donation.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

Oh come on. That system'll run Wolfenstein 3d just fine.

[historychick49.livejournal.com]

Win!

[melstav]

Dude. A 286 with 640K of RAM will run Wolf3D just fine.

[preserver3.livejournal.com]

I was thinking XCOM UFO defense.....

It would play it, very, very well in fact. Probably better than the DOS-Box version provided for 15 dollars on Steam....

Number one game for many, many good reasons....

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking TIE Figher!

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

Wow--you're obviously a fairly recent-comer to the computer biz, aren't you? Happy Shiny Uber-Graphics Games Machines aren't the be-all and end-all to computers.

You do realize that said machine is perfectly fine for doing things like, oh, resumes and similar word-processing so that the needy recipient can work to find a decently paying job in order to be able to afford a more recent-vintage machine if they desire it. And if they can get a basic net connection of some sort (not sure how many dialups are still around, and if you can afford decent broadband you can probably afford to save for a cheap pre-built these days), it also serves as a useful point-of-contact for those potential employers without having to rely on libraries and similar being open. (Granted, I'd rather go with plain telephone in that case, but some companies like e-mail contact as well.). Of course, MS no longer supports Win9x at all, or the older versions of IE, but if they can get it onto the machine (or for that matter, the Linux idea isn't that unreasonable, presuming that the machine will go through another, tech-savvy party to get to the needy) they'll have access to a web browser, providing them to even more capability to job-hunt. Yes, it won't handle all these flash-bloated pages that are around these days, but that's actually not that important when the alternative is nothing at all.

I swear, kids these days. The system requirements needed for practical computing and communication were surpassed a decade ago--the primary thing driving hardware upgrades these days is gaming. Take a look at most of the components in your current machine, and ask yourself 'If it weren't for wanting to play Game X, would I have needed to upgrade this?'.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

*peers at this, and the responses below* You kids do realize that there are *other* uses for a computer than a gaming, right?

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

I've been doing this work 10 years or so.

Yeah, sure, you could slap a stripped down version of Linux on it, and it might run something resembling well enough to use. But there comes a time when stuff just needs to be scrapped. And for this machine, that was about 6 years ago at least. It's not like you can get serial port mice for it in a store anywhere.. or a parallel port inkjet, for that matter.

Personally, I wouldnt donate anything much older than a PII era system. Anything older than that would just be cruel and unusual punishment.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Sorry - Its too old to get a semi-secure browser onto it to use for porn.

[wibbble]

This machine doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for Ubuntu. A 486 with 8MB of RAM really is beyond usable for anything other than novelty value, even with Linux.

Also, you're a bit of a dick.

[preserver3.livejournal.com]

To avoid flame bait, let's simplify this. There are COBOL compilers and IDEs that won't run on a 486dx with 8MB of RAM, there are many other compilers and even some bash environment scripts that would be hard pressed to provide good parsing of text files and systems with such limited resources. While I could do a resume in VI, check the web with lynx for many websites, and run a host of programs, and even grep through systems, the ease with which a non-tech savvy person could perform these activities would be moot. Web safe browsers, needed to look at many job sites won't run there. While I've seen a few webservers running on old 486 boxes, it is fairly difficult to run the monitoring daemons and the scripts needed to serve the apps on such simple machines. While it's true the bleeding edge is mostly for games, the financial, engineering and information output engines follow the leading edge of this material and put it to excellent use. To the decade figure, I look back at the machines I worked with in 1999, and consider the Pentium Pros, Pentium II's and III's and wonder what you're talking about here, given heat issues, memory faults and failure rates of those early machines. It was a hard row, to a happy now. I have a functional commodore 64 that can do more than merely game, but it definitely has its limitations.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

Well, this is presuming you're going for new products to upgrade with--part of the idea here is that if you're getting enough surplus income to really think about upgrading, you've got the surplus to save up for a low-end prebuilt machine.

Serial mice--yeah, that'd be a problem if the one you were using broke, as even in 9x trying to navigate with just the keyboard was a pain. You might be surprised, though, what's floating around especially in donation-driven resale places. Not sure when they switched from serial to PS/2 on the 486s, either..I seem to remember using a PS/2 mouse on mine, but I could be wrong.
And as far as parallel-port inkjets...hmmm, I'm looking at my parallel port *LaserJet* sitting next to me that I got when my place of work ditched their office system in favor of a new vendor (B&W only, but hey, it's laser *and* I got 2 additional toner carts along with the nearly full one in the printer to begin with). And if you're really that much in need, I have seen the occasional dot-matrix still floating around--though that would be counterproductive to using the machine for resumes and such, as the quality's not that good compared to inkjet--and I *haven't* seen a daisy-wheel for ages.

As for the PII...that one, I could see as a potentially valid point--and kinda makes me wish I had some spare cases, power supplies, and smaller drives for the older gear I have sitting around so I could donate--then again, the place I'd be taking it to would rather have complete systems, and I *don't* have extra keyboards, monitors, or mice around. :-/

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That.

The last time I did anything with a 486 was sometime in 2003 or so, and even THAT was just to prove a point - and all I did with the damn thing was run dhcpd on it headless.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Very true, but finding that appropriate someone for older gear can be a challenge.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

I'm to the point that before adding another old box into the mix for some purpose, I have to balance the power load, heat output and noise against the horsepower the box will bring to the mix.

I'm actually looking at putting some things on low power, fanless atom boxes for this very reason.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

C64 to Amiga (my poor 128D never got used, since it showed up only a day or so before the Ami) to 486, here--the latter at a point when the aforementioned PIIs were the current thing. Up until the last few years, I've been *badly* behind the hardware curve myself (helped in part by generous friends online willing to send me their cast-offs and closet-queens), so I tend to be aware of what can be done with older hardware.

Hmmm-actually, you do bring up a very valid point that I overlooked initially--that 8MB of memory could certainly be an issue. I keep forgetting how much even the earlier Intel platforms hogged (I keep remembering what my Ami was capable of with only 8MB).

And yeah, the 'decade' figure was probably an overestimate, but not by a huge amount. It just makes me want to smack people upside the head (though not with a cane *quite* yet! ;-) ) when they come across with the attitude f 'It's worthless junk because it can't do the Latest Greatest Happy Shiny Thing!'. I've already seen that with people putting down single-core machines at all as being hopelessly obsolete, and a few (very few, fortunately, and they've pretty much obviously got cranial-rectal-inversion in general anyway) that are already declaring that about dual-cores. :-/

[jjjiii]

I think the battery charging circuitry on a netbook has more processing power than that thing.

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

honestly? on that? even plain pentium is no longer supported, let alone a 486DX. Even my phone has more CPU than that, and it is just a crap Motorola.

And I hate to say this, but on a slow machine (P2 266 256MB), Win2000 ran faster than a customized flavor of Ubuntu.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

slackware 4.0 would run great on it. but...anyone who's down with the slack wouldn't want that ancient POS anyway. Hell, I've thrown p4s in a dumpster recently...

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

er, I don't think so actually. I'm pretty sure wolf3d required 386 instruction set.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

Ah--and here is the point that people seem to be missing. You can afford to decide whether or not to add *another* box to the mix. You can afford to buy a new atom box as an alternative. Heck, there's the fact that you have more than one box in place in the first place.

You're pretty much on the other end of the spectrum of the kind of person that the box in the OP would be going to. I quite readily agree that it isn't a great machine, and if you're trying to do anything 'modern' with the massive bloat that entails you're SOL. But for someone with no computer at all, and insufficient income to get even a Eee box? Still useful (Though, I could see a problem with the memory amount, unfortunately. :-/ )

[wibbble]

It's really not useful. Going to the library and using the computer there is more useful than an aged 486 running something that has no relation to anything they'd use in the workplace.

It's not like people are dismissing something that could run Windows XP here - I think you've picked the wrong example to use to express what appears to be your pet hate of people dismissing older computers as useless.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

honestly, your mom sounds like a perfect candidate for Ubuntu indoctrination ;)