In this thread I want to post reviews of machines that I pick up and use for things and that I think are surprisingly good for getting them for free.
In today’s case I got a Dell Studio 1558 for free. Mine is about mid spec with an i5 M450 at 2.4GHz and 3mb cache, a good keyboard, REALLY good speakers, kind of meh hard drive, no gpu, a 1080p screen that actually looks brilliant and is rather bright, and the keyboard is perfect. I can change the keys to dvorak and they feel amazing (though if you get one I don’t recommend changing the keys around until you look up how the scissors go together and how they undo. I broke 2 and had to steal the home and end key scissors).
At the moment I have the machine running Void linux. Its updating with pretty good download speed, the blacks are actually black instead of gray, it sounds amazing (like almost as good as my HP NW8000 speakers and THAT is a challenge), and I am really really considering making it my main laptop. Its keyboard is awesome and I appreciate the large res screen at 15 inches, though I DO wish it had the AMD HD4570 in it that was in-spec… But the intel HD whatever the hell is in it should work fine.
None of the ports are smashed. It even has firewire. Batteries seem to be really cheap online and if you have a dell power supply from 2010 and on it’ll work with that and those can be found everywhere. I have yet to play with it more when the update finishes, but when it does I’ll be adding more to this thread and specifically this post.
Edit 1: So building packages it seems to be able to rip though make’s really quick for the chip that’s in here. I can’t say if it is better than my thinkpad or equal, I won’t have much better than it for a while I think (2420m at 3.2 ghz) but it seems to keep up rather nicely. Haven’t tested GPU yet. I’m actually not sure how to install steam on void… I just threw it on here because I had it.
It has 4GB ram at 1066 (I think its 1066) and can take a max of 8GB. I gave it 10GB of swap so I’m not going to bother with giving it more ram. Its not really worth it.
So far I haven’t found any driver issues, CPU temp is at about 28-32C… Seems like a solid recommend. Makes me wonder how many of these are floating around in recycle bins to be honest.
Steam is easy enough on Void, Just got to enabe the nonfree repo. If you are running 64bit there is 9 or 10 more 32bit packages you have to install to get it working though.
That’s the thing the industry don’t want people to know, Computers became powerful “enough” for 95% of users around 10-15 years ago. All they could do at this point onwards was make them cheaper/smaller/stylish. It make marketing trick, but not building them.
When her laptop died I picked up the Lenovo refurb from Micro Center as a temp replacement.
She doesn’t want me to spend the money for a better PC. (so I’m collecting used parts cheap)
This is good for her needs.
All she mostly uses it for is to watch movies and the Core2Duo has bad video.
The GT 720 was just for playback but it can play a few games, like Goat Simulator = her favorite.
It will even play Far Cry Primal (a shitzengiggles test) . . . at 17 FPS!
She was having too much fun to realize how crummy it runs.
She doesn’t care that her PC is 1/2 fast.
If you get a 5:4 monitor, drop the res down to 720p, make it accurate and not scaled in the nvidia settings, and bam 60FPS. A 720 is an awesome gaming card. People right now seem surprised and amazed that a 1050/ti, which is basically a 970, is capable of 1080p gaming when earlier they SHOULD have been surprised that a 720 was as good as a 550 with some weird screen settings.
Older games, sure. There are plenty of GOG’s.
Newer games, even not demanding titles like Rocket League, run too slow for me to tolerate.
The Core2Duo may be the bottleneck. When I get Ryzen, she will get the i5 I’m using now.
I was pleasantly surprised.
The Lenovo only has a 220W PSU so my choices were limited.
Her upgrade was a ‘since I’m doing this I’m going to max it out with the best parts that can fit’ move.
I think of her PC as “Buy Windows and Micro Center threw in a free computer”.
If M$ would stop piling on the frivolous animations and unnecessary junk, an Athlon or a Pentium would still be fine for 80% of people who just want to get on facebook
Great thread topic OP. My daily at home is an old T420 and I love that thing- it drags a little when running a Win10 VM, but not so bad that I avoid it.
With all of the light weight Linux options, projects that port chromebook OS to laptops and even x86 Android projects, it gives a new lease on old hardware. Funny how trends change and I was looking at beastly desktop replacing laptops but then starting looking at chromebooks, and now I’m intrigued with android phone powered laptop shells such as super book and sentio-- and now the concept build from Razor (in collaboration with sentio).
My last build was an upgrade from LGA775 Q9550 to Haswell 4670k. My main reason for the upgrade was my board did not support AHCI, only IDE mode for hard drives. This resulted in sub par SSD performance. By now, I am sure I would have run into a CPU bottleneck with my current GTX980. If I still had the hardware, I would test this.
I had honestly thought this was the one real reason why linux would eventually win the ‘numbers game’ somewhere down the road.
As Microsoft keeps throwing more and more machines on the waste pile with newer revisions of os’s (or service packs which drop processor support) that deem the hardware as no longer ‘good enough’
Linux takes these machines and makes them usable again.
As old pc’s vastly outnumbers new… then this should mean that linux’s install base will eventually win
But this doesnt seem to be happening.
It makes me believe that there are not enough people like us that care enough to do this.
@flazza, I’m with you but IMO its being a techie outlook blinding us and making our imagined/predicted outcome a fallacy and not reality. I still remember being more newbish and how toxic linux help seemed to be (maybe still is). Like one of Wendell’s earlier linux vids, “The Linux Community Sucks: According to Almost Every Outsider” – its a thing, linux fan-boys not helping adoption- the classic demeaning IT guy attitude I still see in the IT and Security industry and typical enough to even have an SNL skit about it. Its not just them, ask a stupid question on a car forum and don a flame suit.
Another aspect is a car analogy I have. Personally I like to understand, mod and wrench on cars (in the car thread I posted up some new stuff I got), but the general masses just want to trade-in and buy new. I think the same with computers, they don’t want to mod, get under the hood, make it their own, they want to buy new, flashy social economic statements that “just work” (but not really these days) and not make getting ‘online’ a day long project. I get it, I get really flustered when I just want to get something done and it takes me days to figure it out. Its not productive and a lot of people have workflows, even if not legit work but just wanting to browse the web. Generally people want turn-key and/or economic class statements and that will continue to drive where computing goes.
Heck I went to uninstall an RPM yesterday and its annoying how much googling I had to do vs. using an OS where I click a few buttons and done. IMO Ubuntu is the biggest force in driving user adoption- I hated their UI but applaud them for actually trying to get adoption up vs. being just another enterprise only effort.
