[ale] Linux in DeKalb County Schools

[Michael Trausch]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 22:04, Chuck Peters <cp at axs.org> wrote:
>
> The last machine I recall that didn't have a sound card built in to
> the motherboard was a Dell Intel P3 500Mz.  If the machines are that
> old, try to get someone or organisation, to donate a P4 of better.  Do
> you have a computer recycling for schools organization in the area?
> Did you look in the back of the machines and see if it had a sound
> output?  Did you or could you run lshw and lspci as root?

IIRC, sound cards were standard starting around the era of the Pentium
(rarely did I have to get a sound card added into a system that had a
486, but I remember buying sound cards as a regular thing before that.

That said, why consider a P3 to be too old for use?  I have systems
around that are still useful with P3 processors in them.  They aren't
really well-suited for playing games on Facebook with twenty other
tabs open, but for a basic Web/email/Internet system, they work just
fine.  Take the original Windows off of them and they're even better,
of course.

The only reason I would recommend and upgrade is if the systems'
memory or HDDs have to be upgraded.  If you consider labor to be a
cost, it's less expensive to buy a new entry-level desktop system that
has a 64-bit dual core processor than it is to buy and subsequently
replace the RAM and HDDs from an older system.  But if you have spare
memory and spare HDDs and can keep the older computers running without
having to spend too much money, then why the hell not just do that?
That'd be smarter.

Particularly since you don't truly *need* powerful computers until
college, anyway.  A P3 with 512 MB of RAM and 40 GB of hard disk would
be, IMHO, sufficient for use in a primary education environment.  If
it is not, then either the kids are doing things they do not need to
do during school hours, or the systems are running Windows.  ;-)

   --- Mike