Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

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Soo I pulled out my ageing laptop (self.permacomputing)

submitted 1 year ago by dillekant to c/permacomputing

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Inspired by the posts here, I've recently tried to set up a garage electronics workstation, and part of that involves setting up a PC. Inspired by the posts here, I pulled out my old laptop and stuck Debian on it. The good news: Debian runs fine on Mate, and all the hardware which matters works properly. The bad news: The laptop not only screams like a banshee continually (the age and usage have worn out the fan bearings), but it also has a dual core processor with about a quarter (half the cores at half the IPC) the performance of a Pi 4, and half the RAM at 2gb. Wish me luck everyone.

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[–] poVoq 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You could probably take it out of the case and rig up some external cooling fans powered via USB or so.

Additional RAM and a STAT SSD would be probably an easy and cheap upgrade as well.

[–] dillekant 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah right now it's working OK, even for internet, so I'm trying to see if I can survive as is. Otherwise I'll replace as the need arises. I might consider pulling out the cooling solution and putting fresh thermal paste, and oiling up the fans.

[–] BastingChemina 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you cleaned it recently?

Old PC and especially laptop can gather dust inside that prevent heat from escaping. The result of that the component are overheating and the fan are running non stop.

Get a can of compressed air, open the laptop and blow ask the dust.

[–] dillekant 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah was thinking to do that, just open it up, give it a good clean and lubricate, re-apply thermal compound.

[–] demesisx@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m incredibly biased but you should try putting NixOS on it. With NixOS, you could create a configuration that you’d only have to reason about once then it is set for life. NixOS’s style of config does a lot of great things for reliability too.

[–] dillekant 3 points 1 year ago

I too am incredibly biased ;). I'm a dyed in the wool Debian nut, so I'm basically going to replicate my main setup. The hardest thing is sshing into my home directory of my main PC and moving my configs over. Annoyingly, it seems the computer is too old for Wayland, so Sway won't work. I think I'm happy with Mate.