Comments on: A reasonable investment or two

By: In-house shuffle « Motho ke motho ka botho

In-house shuffle « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:13:55 +0000

[...] the side effect of all these machines dying, and hard drives being replaced with CF cards, and machines getting upgrades, is that I actually have three or four conventional hard drives lying around, all blank and needing [...]

By: Memory’s in the corners of my mind « Motho ke motho ka botho

Memory’s in the corners of my mind « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 03:36:26 +0000

[...] started with the myth about more memory arbitrarily improving system speed, and continued with the purchase of a gargantuan chunk of memory around the same time. And then the issue resurfaced yesterday, with an entire Openbox desktop [...]

By: How to use teapot like a pro « Motho ke motho ka botho

How to use teapot like a pro « Motho ke motho ka botho — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:35:46 +0000

[...] for this example that shows how much of my lowly paycheck went into my X60s, in the form of memory and a new hard drive. First, I’m going to put the make and model of my hard drive in the upper left block. Type [...]

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:15:05 +0000

It’ll probably work better in the newer machine — PC100 vs DDR speed, for example.

I don’t know if you should use the highmem option or not when compiling the kernel, if you use a huge ramdisk. Probably . . . but I don’t know.

By: Favorite computer myths « Motho ke motho ka botho

Favorite computer myths « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:22:43 +0000

[...] adding memory will make your computer faster, and Reacocard did the best job summarizing them here. If you want actual, in-your-face scientific proof that it doesn’t work, you can look at my [...]

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:40:11 +0000

I agree, and ordinarily that’s the advice I give. This machine has entered that post-cutting edge glow though, when the parts are cheap and will be for a few years, before they start to crawl back up again.

So I figured so long as I plan on keeping it, I might as well treat it the same way I treat others.

And those SSDs are still overpriced in my opinion. If they were about half as expensive, I might consider it.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:37:16 +0000

That’s one of the reasons I decided to go ahead and buy the extra memory. I’ve been wanting to try this properly for a while.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:36:11 +0000

Well, if we’re talking about an internal drive, then I would suggest the smallest but fastest drive you can find. If you’re lucky enough to come across a 10Gb 7200rpm drive (one of which, a Western Digital drive, I used to have ), I would suggest using it until it fails.

But remember that the internal drive on a Pentium II probably can’t connect to a SATA3G interface; the pins are completely different. You probably don’t need me to tell you that, but I feel obligated to mention it before you run out and buy that drive for a P2.

On the other hand, I’ve had pretty good success with quicker, larger drives just by managing the partitions differently. You can set up a system that boots from a partition or two in the first 10Gb of a drive, then manually mount the additional space once it’s up and running.

And of course, there’s always this as an option …

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/poor-mans-ssd/

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:03:35 +0000

I’ve never had much luck with those; they never seem to improve things much. I shall try again though.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:01:18 +0000

That is probably the perfect summary of the point I have been trying to convey for years. Thank you.