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Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018 08:10 am
So about that pile of computers I rescued from the dump... eh, er... yeah.

After careful Googling I discovered that two to them could have their CPUs upgraded. One came with a 2.2 Ghz dual core and the other a Pentium D single core. Upgrade the first one to a 3.0 Ghz cpu - 5 dollars? Sounds good.

Swap the old one out and put that into the other one. Now it's rocking dual cores! Upgrade cost: 0 dollars.

Will these 10-12 year old machines ever run GAMES? You know... first person shoot 'em ups? Seems to be the only game type out there. Eh, maybe some older ones with the right graphics cards. And they'll be Linux systems because Windows is 100 dollars a pop. Gaming on Linux is a different discussion. But word processing, web surfing, audio editing, graphics, video editing... a little chancy on the last one but otherwise they'll be fine.

-m
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Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018 10:07 pm (UTC)
Where do you get a (3.0 GHz, dual-core) CPU for $5? I'm pretty impressed.
Edited 2018-05-23 10:28 pm (UTC)
Thursday, May 24th, 2018 12:29 pm (UTC)
I tried a floppy disk

Now there's some old school tech. I literally haven't touched or even seen a floppy disk in the wild since maybe 2003. And the last time I seriously used one was on an Apple computer, back in 1988 or 1989, at my high school.

I had to do a BIOS update from a USB stick to use the faster CPU

So the BIOs can support the faster processor with the BIOS update, at least. Not all can, and I hate reaching a ceiling on them that can't be circumvented.

It was an Amazon reseller. The price was originally 15 dollars but there was a price drop.

Yeah, I could see that. I've looked up older CPUs/mobos we have kicking around here to sell on eBay and the best I could do on most of them was maybe $27 each, and those are some old damn processors (single core, max speed maybe 1.7 GHz?). And I thought/still think that at that price it isn't worth the trouble of listing them. So to get one at that speed for $5 sounds pretty good.