dmd platform support - poll

[Nick Sabalausky]

"John Reimer" <terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:28b70f8c105848cb368cfc3632e0 at news.digitalmars.com...
> Hello Nick,
>
>> "Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message
>> news:gj6mld$294o$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>>> John Reimer wrote:
>>>
>>>> Incidentally, I'm still using my Compaq Presario X1000 laptop
>>>> (Pentium M 1.4 GHz) which is probably close to 6 years old now.
>>>> I've updated certain aspects of it and fixed it a couple of times.
>>>> Amazingly it keeps running... and performs quite well for my needs.
>>>>
>>> As my main machine, I use a P4 at 1.6 GHz, 512 Mb ram. I'm not sure
>>> how old it is, but when the power supply failed and I went to the
>>> nerd store to replace it, the guy said "I haven't seen one of these
>>> power supply configurations in years!" He sent me to the local pc
>>> recycler, where I got one out of a bin for $10.
>>>
>> Now that I don't feel like I'd be laughed out of the discussion in a
>> flurry of posts involving words like "archaic": Mine's a:
>>
>
>
> Ha! :)
>
> I should confess something here.  Two or three years ago, I actually 
> purchased components and built two AMD Athlon 64 systems for myself 
> (sequentially... not both at once).  The last one was a dual core.  But I 
> gave them away to family and settled on just using my old laptop.
> Both systems had fairly powerful graphics cards in them too.  They were 
> good systems and were great for playing the latest flight simulators... 
> but I decided I wanted to spend less time on games. :).   Right now the 
> dual core system is put to very good use by my younger brother and sisters 
> for video editing... one can never get too much power or memory for that 
> task.  Also, nowadays, video-editing among non-professionals is quite 
> common... so I think there may just be a whole lot more justification for 
> buying into some of these powerful systems than you might realize.
>

Oh yea, absolutely. Like I said, if I were one of the people out there that 
did a lot of video editing, I would want an upgrade, but I just don't really 
do that much of it. But video editing is one of the reasons I switched from 
my old AMD cpu to the 1.7 GHz Celeron: Premiere Pro requires...I think it's 
SSE2 it needs...but whatever it was, my older AMD CPU just didn't have it. 
(I do have a few beefs with Premiere, but I've just never liked any of the 
consumer-level editing apps...In fact I rarely like consumer-level apps at 
all. They're like the Fisher Price of software, except adults use them.)

>
>> - 1.7 GHz Celeron (was a 1.2GHz AMD K6-2 for a long time, but I bought
>> this CPU/MB off someone for about $25, seems to be about the same
>> performance though (makes sense, Celerons are notoriously low on
>> cache, or at least were last I checked)).
>>
>
>
> I've never heard of a 1.2 GHz K6-2.  Was that overclocked or something?  I 
> think most of those maxed out at 500 MHz.  I've used k6-3's and k6-2+'s 
> before.  Excellent CPU's for the time.
>

You're right, it wasn't a K6-2, I'm not sure why I was thinking that (I 
don't think I've ever even owned a K6-2). It was an Athlon Thunderbird.

>> - The motherboard's USB is v1.x
>>
>
>
> I can't stand USB v1.x  ... it's way to slow for hard drive operation. 
> The bandwidth just isn't sufficient anymore.
>

The only external HD I've been using is my portable media player, and I 
haven't had too much of a problem just setting up a batch copy and doing 
something else in the meantime. I do have a $20 USB 2.0 add-in card though. 
I don't remember if I actually have it plugged in at the moment though, this 
motherboard's pretty limited on expansion ports.

>> One other funny anecdote about "newer/trendier is not always better":
>> I've been recruited by a friend of my mom to replace/supplement her
>> small business's wireless network with a wired one.
>>
>> And now I'll stop rambling ;)
>>
>
>
> Wired is not necessarily backwards. :)

Exactly my point ;)  Average Joe Consumer sees all of this "Wireless! 
Wireless! Wireless!" hoopla and thinks it's "just simply better". Meanwhile, 
people like us are well aware that wireless is worse than wired in pretty 
much every area besides the convenience of not having a cord.