[sclug] On ultra cheap machines

[Alex Butcher]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, David Given wrote:

> My father's been complaining that his desktop PC is running very slowly,
> spending a lot of time swapping. After discovering that it's got 768MB
> RAM and maxes out at 1GB, I think out found out why.
>
> What's the current state-of-the-art in cheap and nasty PCs? He's not a
> gamer, and will use it mainly for some light DTPing and scanning and
> driving a printer, so it basically needs no performance whatsoever. It
> needs to run Linux and, um, Windows XP. The case is fine, so it probably
> just needs a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive.

Sounds like something like an N2800 Atom desktop board (e.g. Intel DN2800MT)
might do the job.  Dual core, hyperthreading, x86_64, can take upto 4GB of
RAM (less whatever the BIOS reserves for PCI IO etc). I've got an N2800
netbook and it's usable enough if one bears in mind its inherent
limitations.

Only downside is that the binary graphics drivers need antique versions of
the kernel and xorg, or you end up using gma500_gfx and the xorg modesetting
driver (no 3D, no video playback acceleration)
(<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Poulsbo>).

AMD's Fusion might be an equal or better alternative, but I haven't used it.

HTH,
Alex