Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

Welcome back to Frugal Friday!  This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which have changed as we've proceeded. (As things have settled down to a nice steady conversational pace, for example, I've deleted the rules about only one tip per person per week and about limiting the length of comments; I was worried early on about people flooding the forum with too much too fast, but I think we're past that risk.)

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

Comments

Re: Computin' like it's 1984

[(Anonymous)]

Your price to value ratio on those computers is excellent. With a price of $0, return is infinite! :-)

Your current machine will probably do fine with MX Linux, antiX, or some of the other distributions mentioned by other commenters.

I like the MX/antiX collection of utilities to help you set up a USB drive. You could buy a USB 3 thumb drive of 64 GB or larger capacity (make sure it has a USB type A plug for your computer), and use the tools from MX Linux to set up the thumb drive to boot Linux. How-to guides are available at mxlinux.org. Then shut down the computer, restart it, and tell it to boot from USB if available, before it attempts to start Windows from the hard disk. Now you can test out if Linux will work for you.

If so, you could continue to run it off the thumb drive, or you could then install it to the hard drive. Permanent installation makes for more convenience, but there are a couple of gotchas because Windows assumes it has the hard drive all to itself, with hibernation/suspend as a key problem area rather than shutting the machine off when done.

If MX runs too slowly, try again with antiX. Also, when you shut down Linux, be sure to unplug the thumb drive, as Windows doesn't know what to do with it and will prompt you to format it - erasing everything on it.

MX offers a choice of user interfaces. I prefer KDE as a smoother experience. If it is too slow, try again with the default version which provides XFCE as the user interface. These bits of jargon refer only to how you navigate windows and menus, not to the overall functionality of programs you run.

There may be some troubleshooting up front if you have very unusual hardware or particular types of video cards. Once everything is up and running with Linux, it usually doesn't randomly go bad over time like Windows.


C from C