Re: Linux as a server? Advice to newbie please.

On 2007-08-20, Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It's admirable to "recycle" old PCs this way, but I sometimes wonder
about the real sense of it... Eg. an old PC sucking 60-80W vs. a modern
low-power board sucking 10W (+ drives, which of-coruse you power down
when idle)...

It's always hard to decide on which is the most bunny-hugging, using
an old more power hungry machine or buying a new one that eats less
power when running but with the relatively unknown cost of building it and
shipping it plus all its component parts to be taken into account.

It's like cars, do you stick with your old one or buy a new one, when
cars like hybrids are extremely environmentally costly to build, much
more so than non-hybrids. Certainly with cars, the environmental cost
of building them dwarfs the cost of running them for 12 years, even
more so with the current crop of hybrids, is that also true with
computers? Have studies been made on the manufacturing costs of
computers versus running costs, as has been done with cars?

Consumer electronics are amongst the most environmentally costly items
to make and the hardest to recycle, so personally I'd stick with
either an old machine, or get a powerful new machine and use vmware
server to run images on it, I use that route to reduce my machine
count.

Old machines get put onto my local "freecycle" list, I recently got
rid of a stash of 14 machines in component form that were sat in my
attic gathering dust. After dealing with one of the computer
recycling charities and reading interviews with others, it seems that
they're not really worth bothering with, half the machines go to
landfill, with one charity boss moaning about the "arrogance" of
British consumers giving old computers to the third world and thinking
they'd be happy with our "cast-offs"... Brits are perfectly happy
with old computers so why bother shipping them halfway around the
world for them to get sneered at by some charity official and dumped
into landfill. I don't think a P3 400GHz is obsolete, but it seems
the charities are very fussy. I suspect the officials aren't aware of
what the machines can do and what people's needs are.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
.

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