<br>Hi NFLUG!<br><br>I recently moved to Buffalo - I teach philosophy at Niagara University. I've been using linux for about seven or eight years, first RedHat, and now more recently Ubuntu/Xubuntu. I'm still a novice when it comes to understanding many *nix things, though; for example, I've never manually recompiled the kernel. I'm mainly in it for the ideological reasons, the command line, and for the occasional tinkering under the hood.
<br><br>First, thanks for what looks like an active and helpful community!<br><br>My current problem: I have an "old" computer in my office (I think it's a 750 MHz AMD chip, 250M RAM). It's running Xubuntu
6.06, and even that lightweight OS is proving too taxing for it. I think it's all the tabbed browsing in firefox I do ... I want firefox though, for all the awesome plugins (like adblock and scrapbook).<br><br>Anyway I'd like to upgrade / buy a new computer. So I wonder two things: 1. where you might recommend cheap, good computer parts locally. I live near North & Elmwood in Allentown. I also wonder 2. what might be the best
<span style="font-style: italic;">way</span> to upgrade. I know how to scavenge hard drives, power supplies, CDROM drives etc pretty well - I just get nervous when it comes to mixing & matching chips, motherboards, RAM, and the like. I don't understand intercompatibility isuses there well at all. In the past I would just buy a new case, motherboard, chip and RAM as a compatible set from a store, and then plug in old hard drives, CDROMS, and peripherals. But I'd like to learn yet-more economical
ways, if worth the time.<br><br>My office tasks tend to be firefox, emacs, latex, acroread, thunderbird, gnumeric, unison, and some mp3-playing in Xubuntu's lightweight xfmedia. Sometimes OpenOffice, ideally. Do you think just buying more RAM will be enough? (Are they likely still to sell the kind I need?) Do I need to upgrade the chip, you think? And does that mean the motherboard too? How can I be sure the motherboard will seat in the case well? Is it worth learning to replace chips? How can I tell the wattage of powef supply and fanspeeds I need? And so on.
<br><br>Any thoughts / helpful links / anecdotes are appreciated; tia.<br clear="all"><br>Steve<br>-- <br><br><a href="http://stevepetersen.net">http://stevepetersen.net</a>