Hari's Corner

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Bringing an old system to life is satisfying

Filed under: Life and Leisure by Hari
Posted on Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 15:21 IST (last updated: Sun, Dec 1, 2013 @ 15:30 IST)

Computer systemThe old desktop at home was gathering dust since nobody in my family really uses it any more. Almost everybody has a laptop these days.

I then decided that it could be very well be used in my office room. Instead of having to carry my laptop to the office, I could use a desktop system. All I needed was a new UPS (the old one had conked out) and a PCI Wireless adapter (since the router is upstairs, and drawing the ethernet cable to the office would require a lot of cable!).

To be sure, it has its flaws (lack of a proper AGP card and 3d graphics - since the old Radeon 9600 died, I was forced to use an ATI Rage XL PCI card). The system itself has two 80GB SATA hard disks, a HP DVD-writer and is powered by an AMD Sempron 2600+ processor. It's good enough for office work since I won't be using it for multimedia or graphics heavy applications. I installed Debian Wheezy afresh, alongside Windows XP (which is on the first hard disk),  and got it set up for regular office work. I had a bit of trouble with random disconnections with the TP Link WiFi card and the atheros ath9k driver, but it appears to have been resolved now.

All in all, it is a satisfying experience to re-use old computers and components. Laptops are incredibly convenient in a lot of ways, but they lack the ease of component replacement in a desktop system. Also it feels good to use a proper desktop system after a long time. Just feels like I am using a computer again.

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