Getting Rid of an Old Notebook?
A lot of folks have been talking lately about upgrading to the new MacBook Pro... or for that matter upgrading in general. And honestly I've been looking around at machines myself.
The only machine I have for development right now is an HP notebook with 1gb RAM (that was *with* an upgrade) and a 1ghz dual-core AMD Turion processor. It's a 64-bit processor although I was told by HP support that they wouldn't support me putting a 64-bit OS on it because there weren't drivers available for the hardware at the time. Anyway this machine cost me about $1600 new when I bought it a few years ago. Today I can go down the street to Staples and get any old generic, bottom-of-the-line HP notebook and for less than half what I spent on this machine it would be twice as fast and have 3x as much physical memory.
However right now I can't afford to upgrade. In lieu of that here's my pitch. If you're one of these guys who's currently upgrading and you've got and older notebook that you're not using anymore, you can contribute quite a lot to the continued development of the onTap framework and the DataFaucet ORM by donating your previous notebook.
My plan is to build a CLAM server (ColdFusion, Linux, Apache, MySQL). :) Then I'll disable the relevant server services on the notebook I have now where all my email and personal stuff is, and I'll do my primary development and testing on the new notebook with just those services on it.
Thanks. :)
I understand the need for inexpensive development machines. I'm working on building my own business using pennies. I run many servers at home for development use including web, email, dns, DB, SVN and ftp/file servers. I found that geeks.com has killer deals on real servers. I've bought two rack mount IBM eMachines this year. Both are Dual AMD 64 CPU machines with Gigs of memory. I spent about $250 to $260 for each server. Of course if your looking for a portable dev environment this won't help you at all. However, keep in mind that with a public IP setup (like I have) and my own SVN server that I can access my code from anywhere I can get on the net.
Hey Will, thanks for the tip on the refurb servers... I had no idea you could get them that inexpensively... They've got some rack mount servers with about 4x the amount of RAM I have on this machine and processors twice as fast for $180 -- roughly what I paid for a monitor. I still can't afford one right now, but I'm certainly closer to affording that than to affording a new notebook. :)
