Hello Mortar!

28 Nov 24 20:13, you wrote to me:

 MM> If you don't mind buying recycled/refurbished gear.

I haven't bought a new (as in off-the-shelf) computer since 1999.  I haven't 
had to.  Off-lease business machines do what I need and I can get them for a 
fraction of their cost new.

For example, I bought this Dell Optiplex 7040 I'm on (i7, 3.2ghz, 32GB RAM) 
for under $600 when it was a year old.  My old reliable HP Elitebook 840 G1 
laptop is six years old.  Paid $194 for it.  Had some spare 16GB laptop RAM I 
slapped in it and it's worked great under Windows 10 and 11, now Slackware 
Linux happily.

I have never had the need for the latest and greatest.  I learned in the early 
90s when I worked for a big electronics recycler in Portland, Oregon, that 
people throw away perfectly good computer equipment just to keep up with 
Microsoft's planned obsolescence timetable.  If you're not dealing with them, 
you don't need the latest and greatest.

Another example: my BBS is running under Slackware Linux n a HPE ProLiant 
ML110 G6 server, probably 6-8 years old now, with a quad-core Xeon 2.4ghz CPU 
and 8 GB RAM, that I bought for $110, with free shipping, from a shop in 
Marietta, Georgia, off of eBay.  That little server has been rock solid.

I have a Dell PowerEdge R710 blade server here: 16 cores Xeon 2.4ghz, 48 GB 
RAM, six SAS drives, 4 1GB NICs internal...got that for free.

So it's all about perspective.  After growing up dirt poor and having been 
given a lot of hand-me-downs and such, I learnbed that newer is not always 
better and after 35 years in IT, not to believe the hype of the latest new 
thing in the pipeline.

-- Sean

... God gives us relatives; thank God we can chose our friends.
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20240209