(no subject)

[naath]

ENOBRAIN. Rant postponed.


Question instead. I want to buy a new computer because this here computer what I have has insufficient memory to manage, er, twitter.

I figure I'd go to World Of Computing and buy a small computer with a 1TB hard drive and 8GB of memory and no OS and stick my current Debian install on it and go "hey presto, a new computer". Are there flaws in my plan? Looks like costing c. 300 quid (I don't need a new monitor).

Comments

[andrewducker]

Sounds like a good plan - so long as you make sure that the hardware all has Linux drivers.

[pseudomonas]

I know someone else on DW recently had the "insufficient memory" problem and found switching to LXDE solved their issues (or at least, postponed the problem for a bit).

[naath]

LXDE?

[pseudomonas]

http://lxde.org/

[naath]

ah, cool

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

Making sure that Debian has drivers for whatever hardware the new computer has? I think that a few graphics cards are not very compatible with any linux.

[naath.livejournal.com]

The thing I'm thinking of has no separate graphics card; but I guess I should probably check.

[gerald_duck]

What are you planning on putting on the 1Tbyte hard drive? Anything important? Personally, I begin to get uncomfortable without RAID, certainly by the 2 Tbyte point, but probably also at 1 Tbyte if it's really important stuff.

If it's all just random video you can download again from the Internet, that's fine. (With me, at least. The MPAA might be less happy. (-8 )

If you just want the hard drive for your operating system, it might be worth considering a much smaller SSD instead — they're far quicker.

But other than that, looks like a good plan. I'm likely to be doing much the same myself in the coming months, though I intend to use a Core i7 and 32Gbytes of RAM which will ramp the price up a bit. I've seen the WoC Micro-ATX case in the flesh and it's quite nice: enough space for things and stuff inside, but half the size of a normal mini-tower.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

What makes you uncomfortable about the absence of RAID?

[gerald_duck]

Non-enterprise hard drives quote non-recoverable read error rates of about 1 sector in 10¹⁴ bits.

So if you have a 1Tbyte drive and you fill it with data, there's an 8% chance some will be missing when you want it back.

Maybe that's acceptable; maybe it isn't.

[naath.livejournal.com]

What goes on it> eh, random shit; and probably not a whole TB of it anyway :-p We have backups at home to keep my random shit safe though.

SSD is nice, but very expensive it seems.

Itty-bitty case == moar desk space for, er, physical random cruft... :-)

[hatter.livejournal.com]

Itty-bitty case does mean you may well throw it out of the window when making changes later and/or throwing it away when need to do some future upgrades. But if you're paying cheap to begin with and reckon you'll keep it a little while, then throwing is fine when it's time. I'd be tempted to use it as an excuse to put a new debian install and copy things as appropriate, with the option to dual-boot if some things really don't work for now - either with your old HD in the new case or in an external drive case.


the hatter

[naath.livejournal.com]

mm, I could do a clean install I guess. Might have to find some disks...

[hatter.livejournal.com]

You could possibly even boot from old-disk and use that to start a net-install onto the new 1tb one. Or follow instructions to make a bootable usb stick installer. Though that reminds me of one point, don't buy anything with SecureBoot UEFI (bios-thing). Either may be easier than finding a matching optical burner and media in modern times.


the hatter

[gerald_duck]

I used to worry about that sort of thing. In my impressionable youth.

Nowadays, I know full well that if I buy a computer I'll run it into the ground for five years (or more) and then it'll be worthless. I've lost interest in upgradability.

Repairability is still important, but a small case doesn't necessarily preclude that.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

Should just work.

[chess]

You might want to consider getting a smaller SSD plus a normal drive to make up that 1TB and stick programs on the SSD for better application performance, but I don't know how much that makes a difference to a Debian-based system (it does wonders for windows startup / Microsoft Office / SQL Server, but those are all things you are unlikely to care about :-) ).