I have a 19 year old tower that refuses to physically die. In 2007 I spent $1,300.00 on it. It was custom built for me. For a lot of years I ran Windows Vista on it. I tried to spend a 100 something dollars to have it upgraded it to Windows 7, but I ran into some audio driver issues, that caused me to finally go back to Windows Vista.
I began experimenting with Linux on it, and have ran several different Linux Distros on the machine. Just last fall, I was still using the machine for Email, some Youtube Videos, Buying things online, Doing some looking things up online, scanning documents and converting to pdfs. Checking audio with audacity. That old slow machine can still do a lot! But I was having some little video flickering with dark background theme with the old onboard intel graphics.
I wasn't sure if it was the intel graphics or my old monitor. So I took an old nvidia card that I had around, and tried putting it in the machine. That fixed the flickering. However that nvidia card can not give me it's full capabilities on the nouveau driver.
I don't do a lot of heavy graphic stuff, either. But I liked to use the machine to watch weather radar. The weather radar runs very heavy on the CPU. Based on what it found from my research it sounds like, because I don't have the nvidia drivers, the computer can't load the radar into the gpu processing, which would also be helpful for some youtube videos.
In the past I have thrown hardware away simply because a company decided they don't want to support the hardware anymore. That cost me something! Time searching online for a suitable replacement, and money to buy the replacement and it is wasteful. I feel it is sad, because just because a computer is really old, doesn't mean it can't still do some useful tasks for you.
I have thought about taking the hardware to a recycling place. But the local computer shop, the same shop I bought the machine from, no longer deals with home users, only businesses now. That makes me very sad, because even though they were not has helpful to me as I wish they could be. They were a place I could just jump in my car, and go talk to someone about finding a computer part, or diagnosing a small issue here and there.
I am aware that all four of my computers are old machines now. My newest one, I built in 2016. Second to that one, I think might be a 2014 machine. The next one down from that is a 2011 machine. And the last is a 2007 machine. That means that I should be looking into getting something new to replace at least one of these. But since I always want all my machines to be able to run Linux, I don't want something that is cutting edge new.
I would also would love to replace my old lenovo laptop. Not only is it an old machine but the case is fragile now. One of the screws, that screws into the plastic case is stripped, and and the monitor hinge is glued inside. Yet I continue to use that machine for checking the file system of the fat 16, fat 32, and exfat flash drives and ntfs formatted hard drives. Since linux doesn't seem to have a tool for that. Unfortunately so many devices that still take usb drives, require the Fat 16, Fat 32, or exfat formats. Even though I have seen those formats get file corruption, when you can't do a simple check disk to make sure things are solid. No the drives are not dying, you can tell that much, cause they are not constantly giving trouble all the time.......... But I do know from experience that those file systems are not as robust as the ext4 file system that I use on my linux machine daily. I might misunderstand how things work with this stuff. Anyhow. Feel free to share with me any tips on this stuff. I am always looking for better ways to do things, so that I don't need to run to Windows to do little things.
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