On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:37:24 -0600, Douglas Mayne wrote:

> There is a lot of room at the "low end" too. For example, I am writing
> this on a system that I got at the local university surplus property. It
> is a Dell, Dimension 4100 (circa 2001), sold "AS IS" with no HD for $20.
>
> MB: ?
> CPU: P3 @ 933MHz
> Memory: 512M
> Video: nVidia Riva TNT2 64M AGP
> LAN: 3Com 10/100
> HD: 250G PATA
> Optical: CD-RW
> Sound: Ensoniq ES1371 PCI (separate board) Power Supply: 200W (probably
> tight for P3)

By a curious coincidence, that is almost exactly the same as the machine
I am using for Slackware experimentation. The main differences are that
mine had no HD (I guess the previous owners were scared of their data
being put to nefarious purposes) and that it cost less than $20. In
fact, I picked it up from the recycling pile in the basement of my
apartment.... So look around you carefully :-)

It runs the full Slackware 12.0 install, KDE and all, just fine. Not a
rocketship, but it's not slow either, and I haven't spent any time on
tuning it at all.

> This is very usable system for working with the web, open office, etc. I
> don't think you will be running any of that software with a P5 @ 133MHz.

There's a huge difference from a Pentium, 'tis true.