Stan Hoeppner wrote: > Moral of the story? The OP may need to spend ~$30 USD for an Intel > PCI NIC to guarantee it'll work on the first go. He probably gave not > much more than this for entire used machines. Factor in that you can > get a brand new mobo/cpu/RAM combo with GbE and GPU today for ~$100 > USD, and spending any money for just the GbE NIC for the old machine > seems not a prudent investment. David Christensen wrote: > I agree that it's very hard to justify spending money on obsolete > hardware. I must have subconsciously assumed the OP had a spare > Gigabit NIC (I have a couple in my spare parts inventory). I agree with all of the above sentiment. Sometimes you just have to let go of the old hardware. But I was responding to a thread talking about adding a network card. Maybe I should have said _if_ you are going to put another network card in the box _then_ stop there. Note that it wouldn't need to be a GigE card. It seems to me that any old 10/100 card should be enough for this machine. I prefer the old tulip based cards like the Linksys etherfast ones. If you ask around to your friends or a local user group you can probably find one of those laying around unused that they would give you for free. And that removes the cost part from the equation. > Without a free NIC, I'd probably: back up the old box (burn to > optical, use external drive, whatever), build the new box, move the > old HDD into the new box, and proceed from there. Moving the old hard drive to the new machine for a local disk to disk copy to the new drive should be easy. I guess that depends upon the vintage of old disk though! But if I had an old 20G disk and had just bought a new 1T disk then I would certainly simply image the old drive onto the new one and set the old drive on the shelf as a backup for a while. In other thoughts... I agree that there isn't a reason to upgrade a particular system from 32-bit to 64-bit. If you have a 32-bit machine then I can't see any reason to upgrade to a 64-bit machine. I still have many 32-bit machines. However if you are building a new 64-bit machine with today's inexpensive ram and are putting 8G or more ram into it then I would definitely recommend using 64-bits for the *new* system given that it has much more ram in it. The PAE kernels are fine. But nothing is as simple as a large flat address space. Firefox is quite the pig. I have routinely killed it on my machine when I have seen that it is up around 2G in memory size. I think it is only a matter of time before Firefox will routinely bump against the 3G limit. Especially now that almost every web site is more Javascript and image intense than before. Past history being the imperfect predictor of the future. This will eventually be a 32-bit issue for FF to lean out. But of course a 64-bit system won't have that limitation. I still would not recommend (yet) to migrate an existing system from 32-bit to 64-bit. Maybe for Jessie it will come together however. I think that is actually very likely for Jessie. Bob
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