I am continuing to work on my new (for me) Dell Inspiron 3670. I have now upgraded the RAM to 32 GB, replacing the 2 8 GB DIMMs with 2 new 16 GB DIMMs. I ordered the memory from Crucial, which has an “Upgrade my computer” button on its home page. With this you can look up exactly what DRAM and SSD upgrades are apppropriate for your particular system. Physically installing the new DIMMs was a little tricky simply because of where the memory slots are placed on the motherboard, but I managed. Since I am now at the maximum possible memory I will not have to do this again, unless one of DIMMs fails.
Tag Archives: ubuntu
A Dell desktop
I found a Dell Inspiron 3670 at Repowered. 16 GB DDR4 RAM, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, Windows 11 Pro for about $300. I need to get some experience with Windows 11, so I bought it. It is working out quite well for me.
An LLM on a home computer
I saw How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes and decided to try it on my Linux desktop system. It took a lot more than 10 minutes but I got it to work.
Looking at the BIOS, the system dates from 2013. Here are the details:
From the Unix past
I recently read Reviving the Glory Days: NsCDE Desktop for UNIX Buffs. NsCDE is based on the old FVWM window manager. When I was a lot younger I got a few chances to look at classic Unix workstations and I thought they looked really cool, but I never has a chance to try one. So I decided to indulge my curiosity.
More on the garage sale laptop
I have worked some more on the HP Pavilion g6 Notebook I bought for $30 at a local garage sale. I did get the additional RAM I mentioned there. It seemed easy enough to slide into place, but I have not yet been able to get the machine to recognize it. So for now I am stuck with just 4GB. Not long ago that was considered plenty, and I was very happy with a 4GB system, but now “they” are saying you should have at least 16GB on a PC. So now I am looking at lightweight Linux systems to see if I can get some more life out of this system.
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