Today, I received a donation of a Gateway tower, 2.26 Ghz, 512 mb RAMBUS ram, 40 gb hard drive @ 7200rpm, Nvidia GeForceMX 440 graphics (128mb). Except for the RAMBUS ram, it's a really nice machine. Rambus is actually an excellent and fast type of memory, but the company screwed themselves with a stupid licensing deal, and their memory is WAY too expensive. It would take $500 or more to take this computer up to 1 gb of memory, and it's not really necessary with the RAMBUS type of memory to do that.
This computer is the first I've had with a good enough graphics card to use Compiz-fusion - the desktop effects that comes with Ubuntu. I decided to enable the effects, install the effects manager and play a little.
Mac OSX and Vista got nuthin over compiz for desktop effects! Here's a demonstration of what the desktop effects can do:
While I like the effects, I probably would rarely use them myself.
2 comments:
Lucky you! I used to have a Dell 2.26Ghz I found in the recycling yard, probably with similar guts, but mine postdated that awful RAMBUS. It does really cut the legs out from anyone who gets one, since it's going to be another ten years before RAMBUS is cheap at all. Maybe one day we'll see the stuff in thrift shops and the price will finally be right.
So are you going to keep that machine, or will it go to the Freegeek project?
RAMBUS is a show stopper. While it can make 256mb work as well as 512 of SDRAM, it's just not DDR or DDR2. I'll probably gut this one, and use the parts. Including the processor and graphics card. I might use those in my own machine, but I'll do a write up on that in a day or two. Got finals right now.
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