On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Adam Tauno Williams<awilliam@whitemice.org> wrote:
The X21 is from late 2001; that is ~8 years old. It seems entirely reasonable to be that such a machine is going to really struggle to run a current desktop install. Expecting a five year life span from a computer is the bench mark I hear most often.
My 390X is even older. P3/500/512MB. Runs just fine. Hacked in built in wireless. Has a 3 hour battery and plays movies just fine. Guess it depends on your expectations. Sure, it's not fast, but it works.
Unless the drives or GPU are seriously lame I don't see why performance on such a box wouldn't be entirely adequate. Unfortunately CPU/RAM isn't the entire performance equation. I've see 'older' machines perform pretty well while newer and [theoretically] faster machines are dogs.
Sorry, I used the overclocked E1200 as a comparision. It's fast a blazes to say the least. Video is not an issue for me since I don't use any kind of bling. That machine has an nVidia 6200 only because it doesn't have onboard. My 390x has a Neomagiv 2.5MB VRAM chip and my X21 has a 4MB Rage Mobility M1(Rage Pro based).
It is also just the times. AJAX websites and other content just require more horsepower - even to browse the web. [Which is kind of the myth behind using Google Docs or that ilk to save old machines - it does not work as web applications are horribly horribly horribly inefficient]. The benchmarking we've done in-house shows that the web browser is one of the most resource intensive applications people run, much more so than their office suite or groupware client.
Agreed. The browser uses more RAM than anything else I use. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org