dmd platform support - poll

[Nick Sabalausky]

"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:

- 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)).

- 1 GB RAM (Only reason I upgraded from 512MB was I had a job that needed 
MS's bloated .NET era SQL Sever client),

- Graphics card that's pixel shader v1 (was a pre-pixel-shader GeForceMX 2 
for a long time, only upgraded because I found this one for about $40 and 
wanted to play around with pixel shaders).

- The motherboard's USB is v1.x

- 21" CRT I got from a CompUSA store-closing for $25. (Funny thing is, this 
was made years ago and goes higher than HD resolution and has no native 
resolution, good contrast, no ghosting, no realistic risk of burn-in, and 
zero frames of "image processing" delay. Silly people and their 
hundreds/thousands-of-dollars LCD/Plasma/DLP HDTVs ;) ) I can't hang it on 
the wall, but what do I care? My desk's big enough.

So, yea, about on par with you two. (Although I do have damn near a TB of HD 
space and still crave more...yea, I'm a packrat.) The only thing about it 
that I feel is insufficient is the number of PCI ports (it's one of those 
reduced-size motherboards...in a non-reduced-size case), but I'm still 
getting by.

I do some occasional video processing/editing, 3D stuff (mainly to learn 
it), and gaming (but nothing like Gears of War or Halo or anything like 
that, besides I prefer to game on a living-room console). If I were to get 
really serious about any of those things, I would probably want a new 
system, but I don't do enough of them to really justify it.

I would kind of like the convenience of a laptop (mine's dead), but the only 
reason I'd be interested in the fancier CPUs on that is for the reduced 
heat/power consumption.

Speaking of laptops, if anyone hears about a company that makes quality 
laptops with an actual built-in trackball, let me know. I can't stand those 
awful touchpads or IBM's "nubs", and dragging around a real trackball in 
addition to power cord, etc, starts taking away from the whole "portability" 
thing.

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 ;)