I had to make a snap decision a few days ago, and my choice has resulted in another orphan parked on my living room floor. This time it’s a Sony VAIO PCV-J15 — an 800Mhz Duron, with 192Mb on a 40Gb Seagate hard disk, all running Windows Me. SIS 730 for a graphics card, CDRW, stereo sound with matching two-point speakers, PS/2 wheel mouse, jp106 keyboard, foldout palmrest, etc., etc.
It’s a pretty little computer — rather svelte and with a gray-and-blue color scheme. Not unattractive in the least. Unfortunately, the monitor is an absolute cow. It looks like — and is as heavy as — something you would strap to someone’s feet before dropping them off the end of a pier.
This homeless child was the castoff of a neighbor who received a much newer, much cooler computer as a gift for an impending wedding. The alternative to me, in true Dickensian style, adopting this waif, was to see it lobbed into a local recycling pit. (Okay, maybe not a real pit, but you get the picture.)
Since there’s nothing wrong with the machine and it’s been fairly well maintained, I decided it should at least have another turn on the great wheel of life.
The plan right now is a complete bath, a strip-down to the frame, double-check of all components and parts, then a few test runs with a couple of distros. After that I might rebuild with something fun on it, like … gee, I don’t know … Linux, and see if anyone will take it home. I have a friend or two who might be interested, either as a gift or as a curiosity. In any case, this one is not going to be a homeless wanderer for long.
But neither is it going to be parked in my living room for very long. I don’t do desktops. 😐
P.S.: 500 yen says I can get it from Grub to X in under 20 seconds. 😈
I never knew that Sony had a VAIO desktop. See, I learn something new every time I stop by here. 🙂
-John
~( ,o)====:::
“500 yen says I can get it from Grub to X in under 20 seconds.”
And “500 Japanese yen = 5.5985 U.S. dollars” as of today, according to Google 😛
You know, I’ve always found that it’s actually far cheaper nowadays to buy parts and put together your own system. I don’t know if it’s the same in Japan (it might be). The plus side is that you can virtually guarantee hardware compatibility depending on which OS you want to install. But of course, it does involve some assembly.
You can put together a very decent machine and probably match a gaming system from one of the major manufacturers for a lot less.
And if you don’t want to get all fancy, you can create a very decent platform for almost half the price.
I’ve installed systems for cyber cafes, and most would rather pay the labour for assembly and build their own systems than buy systems bulk.
Also, newer systems do tend to be far more energy efficient (very important if you have a few computers running at once). You can get smaller power supply units and LCDs always consume less power than equivalent CRTs.
Save the planet and all that…
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“500 yen says I can get it from Grub to X in under 20 seconds.”
800 mHz duron, 192 mb of ram… Good god I would hope so! A Slackware 12 install with a slimmed down kernel gets in at about 14 on my wifes p3 600 with 256.
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