On 12/07/2013 4:45 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
you probably can't even find them second hand any more and why would you bother even if you could find them? it's not at all difficult to find P4s and better being given away for free or just thrown out, they're considered obsolete junk (but considerably better "junk" than the 40Mhz 386 machines with 4MB - megabytes, not gigabytes - RAM that I was running SLS and then debian on in 93 and 94).
P4 is overkill and a power hog compared to many newer processors, ATOM, cough ... ARM or AMD, there are plenty of low power units now that are very cheap and not limited too much (especially by RAM). Heck, even the HP N54L can be had for a very reasonable price and it can take 4x HDDs if you want them -- otherwise using very little power. I've got one HP N54L which I've maxed out the RAM to 16GB, HP says the max is 8GB ... but it works fine -- added a USB 3.0 card and I've got a very nice little box with plenty of capability. It's brand new, cheap and very efficient. Today there are stock units available from $290 with 2GB RAM and no HDDs if you look around; the N40L and N36L units before are not much different and sure to be found in bargain bins or close to /free/ ... if you really want cheap. Cheers A.