New Life for an Old Computer

[BusterE]

This computer is about 8 to 10 years old, though the age of different parts varies. The  AMD Triple Core cpu, Gigabyte motherboard and memory are of this vintage, though the ATI Radeon HD 5570 may be a year or two younger. Approx 6 gig of ram certainly helps.

So it was running Mint 18.3 from an old terabyte drive which had decided to retire. I put in the HD from my destroyed HP laptop and it ran win 7 pretty well, though the 5200 rpm drive showed it's speed limitations in an annoying way.

Just to try it, and because it wasn't much of a cost, I got a small Kingston SSD. From my Mint virtual machine on the Win 10 laptop I created in about a minute or two a bootable USB stick with the latest Mint Cinnamon. Replaced the laptop HD with the SSD.

The install, after I had put in who I am, time zone, passwords etc, the actual install took a long, boring 6 minutes and 23 seconds. Using it, especially calling up a program, is almost scary. It's as if the computer knows what you're going to click and starts before you do. I should call it HAL.

Local LAN was the toughest part, because while Windows could see Mint, Mint couldn't see Windows. Today it worked, and I bookmarked in my home folder of my upstairs laptop. So  far so good. And I created a file on the Win7 laptop drive to move things to, as space is at a premium.

The speed makes it seem young. Should get a few good years out of it.

(The desktop flowers may go later, but they help because of the bullshit spring.)

[buster]

Why doesn't the attachment show? It's even indicated there is one on the left.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for posting, Buster. Very interesting!

I have my Grace Internet radio, tuned to the KOPA radio station in Hawaii and I am listening to the Hawaiian music and talk, in order to forget the Spring we are having , so far! :-)

Bill   

(The desktop flowers may go later, but they help because of the bullshit spring.)

[fox]

I'm not surprised at all at the power of an SSD, especially over a 5300 or 5400 rpm laptop drive. I put one in my 2009 mac mini and it really made it usable.

[Jason]

Why doesn't the attachment show? It's even indicated there is one on the left.

That was my fault. Because you created a new account, I had to approve your post. And I did that but didn't realize there was an attachment I had to approve, too. Now you're in the Posting Member group so further posts should just go straight through without moderation. Let me know if you still can't see it.



Regarding the SSD, thanks for sharing your experience, Buster. There many be those in the group that don't realize just how amazing SSDs are.

I had a similar experience when I put a Crucial 250 GB drive in my wife's computer a few years ago. SSDs can be from 5-20x faster than hard drives and I knew hard drives were the slowest part of the computer (other than external USB 1.0/2.x devices but the difference still blew my mind.

On my own desktop, you can see in my signature lines that I have a tiny 64 GB SSD but it was the best consumer SSD at the time, the Samsung 830 type. I just put my OS and programs on it. Files are usually small or they're video files which stream much slower than regular hard drives anyway so don't need to be on fast drives.

[dougal]

here's a picture of that spring sentiment

i've also 'resuscitated' and older tower and monitor; 2007 HP 6700 quad core with 4gb ram and a radeon card with hdmi output which allows me to hook it up to my DYNEX monitor which wouldn't hold a vga input anymore; loaded it with Linux Mint 18.3...i can hear how much 'newer' it would seem with ssd but i haven't come across any used ones yet, so still using hdds....

[buster]

With tax, you can put a new 120 gig SSD in for somewhere in the $80 range. Probably get it cheaper. You already have a large drive to move all the data to. Connections might be the only problem.

Here's the thing, if you can cut $1.00 a day from those little expenditures, such as a Horton coffee, an extra beer at 5 o'clock, a delivered pizza instead of an on-sale frozen pizza where you add a few more toppings yourself - if you can cut $1/day, it will be paid for before you can say Jack Robinson.

And it will feel like a new computer.

[buster]

Confucius say:

"Wise man does not keep sledge hammer and slow computer in same room."

[buster]

For those with money, Best Buy has a 1TB Internal SSD for $370. And a 480GB SSD for $180.  The prices improve each year.

[fox]

Those are good prices for a Peterborough storefront, but you can definitely do better on a 1 TB SSD at an online store like Newegg, even with shipping. They are presently selling as low as $275. And 480-500 GB SSD's as cheap as $140 right now, with free shipping. Prices for SSD's are better than they have ever been!

[ssfc72]

I would be a bit leery about buying a HD that was rated with a 480GB capacity.

Most HD are rated/built for even capacities, like 500 GB.
At a rated capacity of 480GB I suspect there may have been a flaw in the electronics, when it was manufactured and they were not able to get the full 500GB, so they derated the HD to make it work and to be able salvage/sell it.

I would also suspect, since there may be a flaw in the HD, that further failure of the electronics is probably much more likely and the HD may fail prematurely, in a short while.

For those with money, Best Buy has a 1TB Internal SSD for $370. And a 480GB SSD for $180.  The prices improve each year.

[fox]

I would be a bit leery about buying a HD that was rated with a 480GB capacity.
....

I have to strongly disagree with you. I have had several 480 GB SSDs including an AData that's on the 2011 iMac that I am regularly using at home. I have never had any problems with it; in fact I have never had any problems with any 240 GB drives either, and I've had a few of both.

[ssfc72]

"several 480 GB HD",  how many computers do you have, Mike, 14? :-)

I suspect you may only be using an SSD for a couple of years and then you replace it with another new SSD HD, 

[dougal]

I guess the criteria I didn't state very clearly around "haven't seem any used[ssds] for sale yet is my desire to Reduce,Reuse,Recycle....therefore giving a 'new life' to the tower, as well as some of the hdds and RAM sticks I have in use fits....so I am hoping to come upon a ssd that some one is no longer wanting/using...most likely they may be going up in size, where all I need is something that will hold a Linux OS and a couple of apps(<50gb).

[Jason]

I've seen Crucial and Kingston which are noted for producing quality SSD drives and memory, selling drives in models like 480 GB and 500 GB (and 240/250 GB). I suspect the only difference is that they use different memory in them or they might even just be reporting them differently, because people from the regular hard drive world expect numbers like 120/250/500 when memory actually doesn't come in those neat round numbers. Heck, even regular HDDs don't come in those nice even numbers either.

If the warranty is the same, I wouldn't worry about any risk anyway, except that you should always have two other backups of your data, just in case. Drives will fail, it's just a matter of time, though nowadays you will probably get a new drive before they fail.

Personally, I would never buy used drives though unless I know details about their life cycle (i.e. they were just upgrading and know the drive was working perfectly before ditching it). Or if they were at enterprise drives which are designed for long life and stability. It's just not worth taking risks with your data or the headaches that can happen with usable but intermittently failing drives. Now, if you could test them before you bought them or you got them free, go for it.