How did you spend your ANZAC day? Last night I have built a new computer for Anna, and here it is:
It is probably not the state of the art. It was a retired Compaq Presario at work, added in a few components I’ve found under my desk, so the total cost is almost $0. Here is the spec:
- Intel Celeron 400Mhz with 66Mhz FSB
- 160Mb PC100 SD-RAM
- 13Gb Seagate Barracuda
- Slimline CD-ROM with unknown speed
- 1.44Mb floppy drive
- S3 Virge 1Mb AGP video card
- Creative SoundBlaster 64 PCI
Operating system? Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn desktop edition. It runs Xorg, Xfce and Mozilla Firefox. Pretty much works “out of box”. With Macromedia Flash Player for Firefox installed, it is just fast enough for Anna to play Keyboard-o-rama (currently Anna’s favourite Sesame Street game).
Looking at how useful this old computer (400Mhz Celeron is around 7-8 years old) is to a little kid, especially when you compare to what Michael Dell is using, I wonder how wasteful we have been throwing out relatively-new PCs every 3-4 years.
will she get the viv’s ibook one day?
Probably not. Vivian thinks the iBook is fast enough for her, so the only way she’ll get rid of it is because it is broken. In that case Anna won’t have it either.
Wow Anna is using Linux! Although I suppose she’s interacting with web browsers for most of the times, but you’ll never know, one day she might actually do some command line..
That will run Xubuntu very well :D
Matt — a very nice program (CLiCK) you’ve got there! Indeed a lot of computers have been thrown away where they should have been recycled. A 7 year old PC is still more than capable of running light weight GUI + a browser or an office suite.
Thanks Scotty :)