[mythtv-users] OT: Hardware failure

[Brian Wood]

Robert Bradbury wrote:
> 
> I'm and old motherboard fan too.  I've got an old Gateway Pentium 75MHz
> machine that has a special place in my heart since it survived a fire
> that burned the house down (PS, MBO, CPU & disk drives worked fine
> though not the CD.  The floppy works at least some of the time).  I've
> upgraded the memory from to 128MB (from 96MB).  It runs Windows 98
> (boo!) and Ubuntu Linux :-) [1].  With the added Linksys PCI Ethernet
> card it has access over the network to a few hundred GB of NFS drive
> space on the other in house machines.
> 
> It has extra PCI slots so I could stick a Hauppauge 150 or 1600 in the
> box.  Push comes to shove and I could probably add a SATA card and a
> couple of drives.
> 
> The machine isn't doing much otherwise except collecting dust in the
> basement.
> Can I run MythTV on it?  (I really don't want to spend a week and a few
> hundred $ attempting this if its a lost cause).

I'd say it's a lost cause.

That machine has nowhere near the power required to playback MPEG2
without help (that takes at least 500 or 600 Mhz.).

Even if you could find a PCI 5200 card, I suspect that even with XvMC
that machine would simply be too underpowered.

BEWW