My cute, little, white Shuttle XPC (T62K "Zen" barebones, I think) has been sitting in the corner of my office for 6 months, since being demoted from venerated role of house server. It had been running Fedora, but it kept shutting itself off every few days.
Now I'm wondering if I can do something useful with it. My first thought was a computer for Sherry and her kids. But that would require Windows, and I couldn't get through the early stages of the Windows XP installation process without the machine freezing up; I have no idea why.
Now I'm trying Linux to see if I can turn it into a useful machine for Unc. Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn installed painlessly. The only manual tweak I've had to make was to give myself more options than 640x480 and 800x600. This required editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding in two lines for the horizontal sync and vertical refresh (I got the specs out of the Sylvania F70 user manual, which I fortuitously managed to not lose after 10 years of ownership). A reboot later and I have lots of good resolution options.
But now I'm seeing bizarre CPU pegging, and consistently having Firefox lock up. I tried to log into blogger.com and the page loaded but then the machine started to crawl, to a degree that I was unable to get my login password typed in. I forced Firefox to quit. Loading the NetFlix page produced one of those "unresponsive/slow script warning messages. This is a low spec machine, but it's not THAT bad: 300MHz Celeron, 512K RAM. Something else is going on.
I installed the Adobe Flash plug-in for Firefox, went to YouTube, and the video framerate is bad. What the hell? Rebooting.
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