Re: [OT] Re: The problem with not owning the software

On 1/5/25 7:19 AM, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

-hh wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:
 

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I think what changed for me was recognizing that I no longer need to go
through extraordinary efforts to make an PC last a decade anymore,
because their costs have declined so dramatically over the past 40 years.

 Extraordinary efforts? I have a 12+ year-old laptop that's been a Linux
box for all of its life (after it got delivered to me).  The only extraordinary effort I took was installing an SSD.

For hardware that's only ~10 years old, sure.
But in this case I was thinking further back in time, such as in the 1990s where things like CPU speeds increased by +30% every ~9 months. That high rate of change (vs today's) is what motivated a lot of us to DIY incremental hardware upgrades.

The thing is shut down right now; Imma keeping it around for potential later
usage.
 (I've got an old desktop box sitting up in the attic. Not sure I will ever
power it on again. Noisy, takes up too much room.)

Similarly, I've got a Vista box sitting around right now from an "Estate" clean-out of a familymember's home; not sure that anyone knows its Admin password...but it does have an SSD that I recall that I had installed sometime before 2013.  Keeping it around to potentially make a Linux based NAS appliance out of it, but part of that question will be to see how many internal SATA drives it can support to see if its really worth bothering much with, to repurpose a stack of old small 4TB drives that are on the "don't throw away yet" old hardware pile.
-hh