How much computer do you need?
Posted 12.07.2011
Due to the recent failure of my wife's home office computer, or rather, due to the fact that my wife's home office computer ate 3 LCD monitors in a row, I needed to find a replacement for both computer and monitor. My last spare LCD will hold for now, but the computer was still an issue.
Obviously there is never a good time to be forced into buying a new computer, short term she is using her aging laptop, but that's not the best solution that I can dream of.
About 2 years ago we purchased a Lenovo mid-tower on sale from newegg.com, it was inexpensive because it was being discontinued, it's duel core and has plenty of RAM. I added a discreet video card that had an HDMI port for less than $50 and we have been using it to watch movies, Hulu etc on the TV. It's worked out well.
Turns out that, that old Lenovo is way more powerful than my wife's failed machine, so the Lenovo gets a couple of cannibalized upgrades from the failed box, and now I need something to replace the media center computer (lenovo).
I had acquired an old Dell box running a single core 3ghz Pentium 4 that a buddy was tossing it out. I had been using it to run a Ubuntu workstation at work for Wordpress and Database testing, so home it went. The one upgrade that I had added to the Dell was a Video card with 2 DVI ports to run 2 monitors. I swapped the HDMI card out of the Lenovo and loaded WinXP onto the Dell. I went with XP because the last time I tried I was unable to get Netflix to run in Ubuntu. That may have changed, it was a while ago that I tested it.
Long story short, $0 in new investment got my Wife's computer upgraded and replaced the computer that we use on the TV.
I won't tell you that the Dell is as fast as the Lenovo was, but it has no problem running Hulu, or outputting video at 1080p. My point is that for use on your living-room TV you don't need a lot of horsepower.
