Hi everyone.
I've been reading this forum the last few weeks and picked up lots of useful information. This place is a great resource. It got me excited enough that I decided to make the plunge. We had some older Dell Optiplex desktops just gathering dust at work. My boss was kind enough to let me take one home when I asked. The specs are:
Intel Pentium D @ 3.8 ghz with hyperthreading Socket 755
40 Gig hard disk
1 gig of Ram
The video is Intel's integrated GMA 950with a whopping 8 mb of memory.
I bought a $6 miniplug to RCA adapter and plugged it in to my receiver's Aux input from the PC's integrated sound card.
The ram was upgraded to 2 GB and the disk to a terabyte. I loaded the latest Ubuntu 10.04 and I'm able to view all file formats, dvds. 1080p MKV files drop frames badly. They are mostly un-viewable.
So now I have been bitten by the upgrade and build bug. I would like a mini-itx solution. I am undecided if I should go with a Intel Atom and Nvidia Ion2 board or use my current CPU, RAM and get this board from Zotac.
It is Newegg item=N82E16813500041. I don't have enough posts to place a URL yet.
What are your recommendations?
BTW - Thank you RGB for your tutorials. They convinced me to use Ubuntu over Windows 7. I liked it so much I changed my main home machine to Ubuntu as well from Win7. It has come a long way since V5, which was the last version I had used. I can't remember why I went back to Windows.
I've been reading this forum the last few weeks and picked up lots of useful information. This place is a great resource. It got me excited enough that I decided to make the plunge. We had some older Dell Optiplex desktops just gathering dust at work. My boss was kind enough to let me take one home when I asked. The specs are:
Intel Pentium D @ 3.8 ghz with hyperthreading Socket 755
40 Gig hard disk
1 gig of Ram
The video is Intel's integrated GMA 950with a whopping 8 mb of memory.
I bought a $6 miniplug to RCA adapter and plugged it in to my receiver's Aux input from the PC's integrated sound card.
The ram was upgraded to 2 GB and the disk to a terabyte. I loaded the latest Ubuntu 10.04 and I'm able to view all file formats, dvds. 1080p MKV files drop frames badly. They are mostly un-viewable.
So now I have been bitten by the upgrade and build bug. I would like a mini-itx solution. I am undecided if I should go with a Intel Atom and Nvidia Ion2 board or use my current CPU, RAM and get this board from Zotac.
It is Newegg item=N82E16813500041. I don't have enough posts to place a URL yet.
What are your recommendations?
BTW - Thank you RGB for your tutorials. They convinced me to use Ubuntu over Windows 7. I liked it so much I changed my main home machine to Ubuntu as well from Win7. It has come a long way since V5, which was the last version I had used. I can't remember why I went back to Windows.
