Hi all,
So, I was wondering...what is your oldest and most low-spec PC/device you still use? For what? What OS? What specs? Picture (if possible)?
Mine is an Archos, I use in the kitchen as HIFI and occasional lookup PC (mails, Ixquick and such)...
Specs: Intel Atom @ 1.2G, 32bit (of course), 1Gb memory, GPU and Audio are Poulsbo...I have Mepis MX on it, and finally..it runs quick, super quick...
Question of the right OS on the right device
Love to read your input...
Thor
Edit - it was playing a youtube track at the moment

Hi Thor!

My oldest PCs (two of the same model) are Nxt computers, about 13 years old, 32-bit, with Pentium 4 @3.06GHz (!) and 2 GB of RAM (I could increase that a bit, perhaps to 4GB I think..).
I use these for work mainly, and moving files around.

I have an older Compaq Presario 3200 (iirc), goes back to 2000-2001, when DVD players were starting to be included in laptops. It still runs, but at this point I like using a live CD (USB might be better, I'll have to try it out) for web-browsing.


brian

Ah, the old Presarios...used to sell these, in a previous life

My oldest computer ... *sniff* but the disk drive lives on ... is a laptop that originally ran Windows-95. Repurposed with Gentoo Linux, it runs ran like a charm.

And I do still own various older computers, but do not usually run them anymore.

IBM T23 as a test box for AntiX releases. 1000hz intel, 1 gig ram, savage graphics=(PITA)

Edit: If Bored: One can see my specs and why I said PITA in this thread

Although recently I have been enticed by "Off Lease" Thinkpads as cheap as $120.00 USD with Core 2 Duo processors and i5's as cheap as $220.00 USD I really haven't had all that much use for mobile computing, but occasionally my main desktop is tied up like when acting as my TV, and I have some minor need to get mail or otherwise google or surf the web, I do still use my ancient Sony Vaio laptop which has a PII 433 MHx CPU and a whopping 246MB ram (maxed out). It runs Slackware 13.37 and somewhat thanks to a replacement Seagate 7200 rpm drive isn't too ridiculous to boot and once up actually surfs rather painlessly being more dependent on cable service bandwidth that CPU performance.

I currently use a homebuilt desktop based on an Asus A8N-E with an AMD 64 FX-57 (at one time their flagship CPU) for music. It runs Slackware 13.37 and is a bona fide DAW. In addition to recording and editing the awesome bang for buck semi-pro sound card (see below pic or visit JULI@ for full-size pics and description/specs) delivers superb sound quality and runs into an active crossover to 700 Watts (350 x 2) driving 12 inch subwoofers and 240 Watts (120 x 2) driving 2 phase-aligned 8 inch mids with strontium ribbon tweets on top. This system is permanently in my band room and can deliver live levels LOUD whether prerecorded material or online through various services like WIKI-LOOPS that are band tracks minus whatever instrument you wish to provide instead of the original.

So in summary I use, but rarely, Sony Vaio 433MHz Laptop but almost daily an FX-57 based DAW and surf machine. My main is an i5 Azrock X-77 box. I'll try to post some pics.

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I can't help but ask... what does a 128k mp3 sound like on that system?

My OLDEST is my desktop. AMD FX-8320 w/ 16 GB ram, 1 TB hdd, 2 GB GTX 760. The motherboard was one of the first generation of AM3+ boards (that's still sold in revision 2.0 version no less) around 5 years ago. Dual booting Windows 7 & Debian Stretch. I don't keep old hardware around, the wife will let me keep it or keep all my paintball gear, but not both, so old hardware gets recycled.

My lowest spec is my HP Stream 11 laptop that's only 8 months old. Celeron N2840 w/ 2 GB ram, 32 GB ssd 11.6" laptop. Currently has Debian Jessie on it, although it seems to change every other month. I actually was rather surprised that the ultra low spec N2840 runs as well as it does. I have a full KDE install and it has no issues whatsoever with it.

Oldest I have and still use is a AMD-K6 333 MHz 512mb memory w/NetBSD 6.1.5. I use it as a data backup system, verify progs I write are able to execute on non-linux systems and to ensure the progs do not have terrible performance.

One thing nice about NetBSD 6+ is it uses a 64 bit time_t on 32bit system, thus no 2038 issues. BTW, IIRC OpenBSD 32bit moved to a 64bit time_t a month or 2 after NetBSD.

John

a 2001 DELL Pentium 4 1.9 ghz with 1 gig ram and a gforce2 mx 400 card ( 96 driver)
runs ScientificLinux 6.7 ( xorg downgraded to 1.12 from SL 6.3 to use the nvidia driver)

this thing was plugged into a spool feed green and white paper( from a big box) dot matrix printer
even older that the computer - that died a few yeas back - i still had a box of continuous perforated paper left
GREAT for all the paper airplanes i made with it

now it is for the web - but a bit slow do to 1 gig ram ( it came with 256 new - a free upgrade from 128 meg)
and has a old HP parallel port printer plugged into it for libreoffice 4

As you might imagine it's as good as an mp3 can sound since the end product is the sum total of the quality of all the constituent parts with the lossy mp3 protocol being the weakest part. It's actually pretty amazing that mp3, or any kind of digital compression, works at all but thankfully the algorithms were designed with keen and studied information on what priorities most peoples' ears and brains place to consider a sound "good" or "full".

People uninterested in digital sound stories can ignore this but anyone who loves sound or even who has a collection of audio, let alone music, that they would like to preserve in a best case manner may find this informative and interesting. I spent a large part of my life in and around Pro Sound both in the studio for my own band and others and "on the road" in touring bands. I have worked with and for a dozen or so people whose names everyone knows. On a far less than Big Stage level, some 22 years ago, my band was playing a college gig in a full auditorium in a Western town a friend of mine called home. He accompanied us to sound check and asked if it would be OK to record the evening's show and we agreed. He went home and ripped out his Panasonic home cassette player/recorder and lacking any recording microphones plugged directly into the Mono output from the PA mixing board which was a Yamaha PM-430 8 channel board augmented by a homemade 5 channel drum mixer plugged into one of the eight Yamaha channels. Our soundman did a great job of getting a reasonable level and impedance match since there was only a slight bit of overdrive distortion.

OTOH what comes out of the board is what is weak and needs reinforcement so it is something akin to a mirror image of what it sounds like in the room. So, for example the vocals are way loud relative to the guitars since guitars only needed slight reinforcement in that size venue. The mix was in both of the cassette recorders' channels but identical since PAs are most commonly Mono. Cassettes, especially slow speed home quality units are noisy and lack extreme bass and high end even in the best of conditions and when new. After being tossed around for 19 years I decided to try to preserve it, even if last ditch or just for fun.

At that time I was just learning about Digital Audio Workstations and had begun assembling a system in my mind but though I had gotten professional recording software the best PC I had at that time was a Pentium III at 1.8 GHz running on a severely hot-rodded Asus P3BF.... Yup! the venerable 440BX chipset. I got the PIII to run by use of a slotkit and extreme FSB settings partly made possible by using a Promise IDE accelerator that was capable of running at the (then) new 66Mhz PCI speeds so that hard drives were stable even though the controller was running overclocked at 46 Mhz. I ran an 8X AGP card at the max 4X so it stayed stable and just got very lucky that the SBLive sound card didn't snap or "let the smoke out". I seem to recall being locked out of anymore than 512 MB RAM but I see some listed these days that would handle 1024MB. Perhaps that was a later revision than mine. In any case it was by no means a Dream Machine for a DAW. It was barely adequate.

Thankfully my years with sound recording and reproduction paid off even here since DAW VST plugins are mimics of hardware and I had lots of experience with compressors, delays, EQs and thankfully even some expewrience with a sound processor made by Barcus Berry simply called The Enhancer or BBE.

In theory the BBE is supposed to be a time/phase correction device. Anytime an audio band signal goes through any electronics stage the phase begins to degrade as frequencies go up. This is why in old analog tape recording lots of overdubs and ping-ponging tracks caused a reduction of clarity in the high end with every generation of takes. If you ever did a cassette-to-cassette copy you know exactly what I mean and if you ever copied a copy just mentioning that may bring up some bad memories of extremely muddy, dull sounding music that had lost all of it's liveliness. The BBE by "slowing" the lows in variable amounts attempts to cancel the effect of the highs having been "slowed". That's the theory. In practice it behaves more like a variable comb filter with a sweepable center frequency. What the user hears is an enhancement of a specified range of frequencies which has the effect of bringing out sounds that were buried before. Because Barcus Berry makes a digital plugin of this effect and because there is no degradation of signal with subsequent passes, it is possible to make many passes and bring out fairly fine areas of the sonic spectrum. Since DAWs can UNDO a pass, it is possible even for the novice to utilize trial and error to get a pleasing improvement on a mix.

So. What was the final result? I played the CD I made for a friend, Bobby Radcliffe, who has played much larger venues than I and all over the world and who has a couple of live albums out in addition to his studio albums and when it was over he was shocked. He said, "Doc. I have spent thousands of dollars to bring a pro crew from NYC out to a gig with their remote on-site truck with a 1 inch 32ips machine to do a live show recording and I just don't understand why yours sounds so much clearer, from a damned cassette!"

So yeah, even an mp3 can sound damned good if it was recorded and mixed well and decent playback hardware is used.