[Watford] New machine

[Alain Williams]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 04:31:19PM +0100, David Edmondson wrote:

> I'm at about 28G (Debian testing, X, xmonad, emacs, mail, documents, …).
> Music and photographs are on the (500G) spinning disk, which is usually spun
> down (you're talking about a desktop so this matters less, but keeping the disk
> spun down is good for battery life and ambient noise).

I made a note to install lm-tools on my laptop.

> Time is money - will you spend more than £100 of time looking? :-)

That is not quite the point. I do things quite often just to learn.

> The place where the SSD really shines is something like 'apt-get update' and
> the install phase of 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.  Booting is faster, but I don't
> expect to do that often.  offlineimap's trawling through my maildir directories
> is significantly quicker.

I don't expect to boot or update very often - so that is not important. I have now
(thanks to this list) added a OCZ 60 (or 120) GB Agility 3 SSD to the spec and
will put /home there - to play with SSDs, which I have not done yet.

> > Video cards, I am not interested in lots of graphics, but on motherboard
> > graphics uses system RAM - which will presumably slow the system down. So paying
> > #25-30 ish for a modest card might seem worth it.

Does on motherboard graphics slow the system. I would guess so, but by how much ?

> I've used on-board Intel graphics wherever possible, purely because they are
> active in keeping their hardware working with Linux.  There are notable
> exceptions, of course, but for the HD[234]000 family I've had no significant
> problems.

Ta

> NVidia has always been a nuisance, as the binary only drivers are necessary
> for many configurations.

Quite: a non starter for a long time.


-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
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