Well, it
had to happen sooner or later. The old Compaq tower turned up its toes and died last week, following nothing more onerous than its annual spring-clean.
She
was fast approaching her 16th birthday. It's a respectable age for any piece of 'tech'.
I've spent my entire computing 'life' using other people's second- (or third-, or fourth-) hand 'throwouts'. For the most part, I've been happy (the anciente Dell lappie is approaching its 18th this year.....and it's
still chugging along).
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But just for once, I fancied something new. So I've splashed out on something modern, for the first time ever (following a bit of a 'windfall' in the UK's midweek National Lottery draw).....and to say I'm gobsmacked is putting it mildly. This is an
HP Pavilion 'mini-tower'; non-ATX - mobo is a 'custom' HP job - making use of a 14 µm 'Coffee Lake'-gen dual-core Intel Pentium G5400 w/HT, running @ 3.7 GHz, and with 'built-in' GPU. A basic, single 4 GB stick of DDR4; two slots, giving the possibility of 16 GB at some point in the future.....though I shall probably never go above 8 GB. For a Puppy box, that's tons.
Storage is taken care of by a 1 TB Toshiba SATA3 HDD.....and the external 3TB Seagate is still doing the honours with my personal data & Puppy 'stuff'. And the visuals are now provided by a 22" 1920x1080 HP 22w HD monitor, through an HDMI connector. Nice to have a decent amount of screen real estate, for once.....even with a higher DPI setting, there's still loads of space.
(I'm a
bit concerned about the relatively low-powered 180W PSU. I don't think the new-ish 500W CoolerMaster B50 from the old tower will fit, unfortunately.)
However, it is
eye-wateringly fast with Puppy. I thought the old Compaq was relatively quick, but I reckon I was viewing things through rose-tinted specs. CPU technology has made great strides in recent years.
The Compaq's dual-core Athlon64 X2 was over $1000 at introduction, and wasn't much better than a doubled-up P4.....pulling nearly 100W TDP on 90 µm construction. This thing was $64 at intro, year before last, and will run rings round it, while sipping a fraction of the power on 14 µm....
That is, of course, progress for ya. I
also like the fact that this is the first desktop I've ever used with wireless built-in, as an addition to Ethernet (which on this machine is of the 'Gigabit' variety). And it works, too, connecting without any drama at all via SNS.
Since it's relatively new "tech", I shall concentrate on the newer Pups from now on; the Bionics, the Xenials. Though I
will keep my Slacko 560 install; "old reliable"!
The reams of info provided here on the Forum about UEFI/legacy booting over the last couple or three years stood me in good stead; setting the BIOS to boot from the 'legacy' side of things was so fuss-free as to be almost humdrum. I booted to a LiveCD of Slacko 570, and proceeded to eradicate the HDD's Redmond-based 'infestation' before it even had a chance to draw breath..!
We'll see how it goes.
Mike.