[mythtv-users] What to check/change when changing LAN subnet

[Raymond Wagner]

On 5/15/2014 12:53 AM, Sam Jacobs wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 6:48 PM, Hika van den Hoven <hikavdh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Everybody has old computers. For a firewall/router a pentium2 with
>> 256Mb memory and an old 20 Gb HD is already overkill.
>
> For something that's going to be powered on 24/7, using an old PC
> possibly isn't as smart a move as you might think, financially. When I
> started using MythTV again, late last year, the machine I used for a
> slave backend was the PC I built way back in 2004 (or 2005) when I
> *first* started using Myth.
>
> I'd forgotten how loud the thing was, but what I'd *never* realised
> back when my mother was paying the bills was how much damn power the
> thing uses! My electricity usage for the weeks I was using it was
> about a third higher than usual, and the thing was off for much of the
> day! The computer I'm using now is a C2D small form factor machine,
> and while it *is* vastly overpowered in the number crunching
> department, it uses just a fraction of the electricity.
>
> There have been massive leaps forward in energy efficiency over the
> past 10+ years, and I'd advise anyone considering using an old
> computer to think about the *real* cost that doing so might incur.

There have been massive leaps forward in energy efficiency, but there 
have been massive leaps forward in raw energy consumption too. Pentiums 
all operated under 20W, and most P2s and P3s operated under 30W, 
maximum. They simply couldn't pull more than that, unless overclocked, 
and they really didn't have that much excess headroom. A typical C2D was 
vastly more performant than any of those chips, but it also idled at 
that much power, and peaks at double that.

Computer power consumption spiked in the mid/late 2000s. There's good 
reason we started getting huge heatsinks for our systems.