[LAU] OT: mineral wars in Congo

[Ken Restivo]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 07:09:01PM +0200, Arnold Krille wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wednesday 07 July 2010 09:55:15 Philipp ??berbacher wrote:
> > The only problem with old gear is power consumption. I don't know what's
> > worse from a purely ecological point of view. Most power is still
> > generated from non-renewable sources.
> 
> Which is the reason I will soon put my P4 system in retirement. Its nice to 
> keep old hardware alive with linux. But its not nice to keep the electrical 
> bill up with devices that have the worst power-consumption/processing-speed 
> ratio...
> 

Like most optimization problems, it's a balance.  Every once and a while, it makes sense to give in and purge/upgrade gear. But, with Linux, at least you aren't forced into doing it on an accelerated schedule due to software bloat.

For 4 years, my router was a Linux 486 with two ISA ethernet cards and a PCI wifi card. The electrical bill and noise got on my nerves, so I replaced it with a Linux Linksys WRT. That Linksys is still in continuous service and has been for 6 years now. Silent, reliable, fast, and uses very little electricity.

I did all of my recording and performing since 2007 with a Core2Duo laptop, until last year when I got an EEE that uses about half as much electricity. But I still keep the Core2Duo around, and fired it up recently for recording/mixing a CD, and will keep it around is it can remain useful almost indefinitely.

-ken