Re: [LUG] Time to upgrade

[Migel Wimtore <migel_wimtore@xxxxxxx>]

I put kubuntu on my parents pc and they are pretty happy with it. It's Ubuntu based, obviously, so it is nice and easy for me to administer (package and advice availability). Is that on the list (I'm not digging back through this thread to find your four, am on a phone)? As far as the hd goes - figure out what size you want, then procure it. I recently got a 2tb usb3 drive and I love it. Had made do with a 300 gb before that and it suited fine, it cost Â70, four or five years ago, so something like that should be very affordable now. Also an ssd (solid state 'drive') is an option: faster, but smaller and more pricey. I am getting good speeds with my new (non ssd) 2tb drive and a usb3 expresscard expansion card in my laptop, and don't have to sacrifice storage density or put down so many dabloons. 
Incedendaly (I mention again), do you have any old internal drives? Because a caddy (connection kit) for one of those is very cheap. Just remember you will need 2.5 inch for laptop and 3.5 for desktop, and either ide or sata connectors (on the caddy), if it's an old drive: probably ide. Cheers.

Neil Winchurst <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 25/10/12 19:59, bad apple wrote:


Yes, that would have been me - running any operating system that stopped
getting security fixes 6 months ago is probably not a good idea!

Is 500Mb a typo? 

Yes, of course, I meant 500 gigabytes. Oops! Currently my home partition
is using about 170 Gb.


That's a *really* small /home. In your case, why bother
with an external USB drive if you have so little to back up? An easier
option would be to buy 2 x 16Gb USB thumbdrives (less than Â10 each from
your choice of online retailer) and set your backup tool (good old rsync
from
cron is my favourite) to automatically synchronise your /home once
a day. Unlike expensive, slow USB attached disks, a 16Gb stick will
survive being dropped, put through the washing machine, etc and for Â20
you get redundant backups. Being so small, it's easy to drop one off at
work/the girlfriends/wherever so even if your house burns down you've at
least got your data safe.

Whilst you're buying drives online, I would hugely recommend plunking
~Â100 on a 128Gb SSD (I'm partial to the Corsair Force 3 models) to use
as your OS drive. If you've never used one before, the speed increase
will absolutely blow you away. Adding more RAM used to be the default
"best bang for buck" upgrade to any computer but not any more. Even if
you've only got SATA2 on your PC, the performance increase is awesome
(and you can buy an el cheapo PCIe SATA3 card for less than Â15 anyway).

What's your shortlist of 4 distros
incidentally? 
Already answered that one. Yes, I have had a look at Debian and I find
it all scary. There is so much there I really can't decide which one to try.

Not quite sure what you mean about getting a SSD drive. Will research it.

Thanks

Neil

-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq