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Re: Advantages of 64-bit vs 32-bit on old hardware



On Wednesday 12 March 2008 02:46:11 Greg Earle wrote:
> I think a better question is, "Are there any particular advantages of
> such old hardware?"
>
> You can find a (single CPU) 450 MHz Ultra 60 with 1 GB of RAM, a CD-ROM
> drive and a 9 GB disk on eBay for US $95.  I cannot fathom for the life
> of me why anyone in their right mind would run anything older/slower,
> except out of pure masochism.

Well my Ultra 10 is 440MHz, so not that much slower than Ultra 60. I fitted 2 
SCSI disks giving me a total of about 80GB of storage, Sony DVD multi drive, 
5 port USB card so I can use USB printer/keyboard/mouse. This makes it quite 
a nice workstation. Some time ago the battery in NVRAM module died, since 
this machine is about 10 years old, but I bought a brand new one, so that 
should last for another 10 years.

The hardware may be old, but it's very reliable and quite usable. Solaris was 
kinda slow on it, but NetBSD feels much faster, it took only 3 days to build 
kde3, koffice, gimp and a bunch of other software I use.

Why spend money on new hardware when old hardware is much cheaper and does 
everything I need.



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