Granted, it is a little beefier specs-wise, but I have the Win 10 Pro 64-bit Preview installed on a Dell Inspiron 530 from mid-'07 and it is running great. It is a Core 2 Quad 6600 (2.4 GHz), has 6 GB DDR2 RAM, a 120 GB Crucial SSD (hacked BIOS re-enables AHCI that Dell removed), 1 TB WD Blue HDD and a 1 GB Radeon 6450.
It works fine, plays 1080p video with no issues but is loud and puts out a lot of heat (105 watt processor). I am looking forward to replacing it with an Intel NUC later this year when the Skylake models are released. About an 80% reduction in power consumption with better performance.
I've upgraded it with scavenged parts to 6 GB RAM (could use more but DDR2 is expensive), a 1 GB Radeon 6450, Crucial 128 GB SSD boot disk and a WD 1 TB data drive. It works great and is surprisingly peppy (I don't game on it, obviously). Originally it only supported 4 GB of RAM, but Dell put out a BIOS update a few years ago that bumped it to 8 GB. And there is a hacked BIOS out there that re-enables the AHCI that Dell removed so the SSD pretty much maxes out the 3 Gbps SATA port. Very impressed after adding the SSD - it boots up in about 10 seconds with 8.1 64-bit.
Yeah, I have had Charter in FW for going on 10 years and it's been good. The customer service had a bad period but has gotten good again. We had a storm come through a couple weeks ago; a neighbor's tree limb fell and took out our cable line. I called them at 9:45 p.m. on Saturday night, got a friendly, not-outsourced person who scheduled an appointment, then got a confirmation call from dispatch about 15 minutes later. The tech was there at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.
The actual internet service has always been solid with maybe one or two short outages a year. And this is different than in the past, but a modem is now included as part of the deal, so you don't have to lease one or buy one outright like with other providers. We have 60/5 (their slowest speed) for $39.99 (regular price is $59.99 when the promo expires) but if you call up and complain enough they will eventually give you a new promo.
I bought an Xserve for my all-Mac department at work (student publications at a big state university) a couple years ago and it has really been outstanding. It's simple to administer, made well, with nice attention to detail, and is reliable and easy to use. I doesn't do a whole lot aside from being a file server (no web serving or anything like that) but it has a heavy, 24/7 load from up to 60 concurrent users, most doing network-intensive things like building newspaper pages, editing D-SLR photos, archiving HD video, etc. It takes it like a champ and only gets restarted when there is a security update.
That said, we have used a dual G5 Power Mac tower with 10.4 OS X Server for a server box for our arcane old Mac-based accounting software for nearly five years and it has also been dead-nuts reliable. It runs 24/7 and also does some light web- and file sharing and has been trouble-free as well. I will be replacing it over the winter break with a new Mac Pro with 10.6 Server.
I installed Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit on my cheapo two-year-old Dell desktop (AMD 3600 x2, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 7300LE) and it is running beautifully. I had to wipe the drive since I had the 32-bit Release Candidate Installed, but that was painless. I just copied my user folder to an external drive, formatted the hard drive, did a clean install and then copied my stuff back. The install only took about 10 minutes! Copying my stuff back and forth was actually the most time-consuming part.
Over the years I have pieced together a modest setup in my house (Onkyo receiver, 6.5" Infinity bookshelf speakers and a 10" Cerwin-Vega subwoofer behind the couch).
It sounds pretty good to me, but it always blows away people who come over. It seems most of them use computer speakers or little mini-systems, and hearing music on a powerful, full-range system is sort of a revelation to them.
The first mini-USB device I bought was my Nikon D50 back in 2005. Then I bought a T-Mobile G1 in November and got a TomTom nav system for Christmas.
They all have mini-USB and it is so convenient. I can use the same car charger to power the TomTom and charge my phone, and I can use the same cord to connect all three to the computer. The G1 will also charge from any USB port so that is handy.
I have a dual 450 MHz G4 that still runs 10.4.10 beautifully. Any word on if my ol' girl will run 10.5?
If you take a little liberty with the processor speeds, my system meets all the requirements:
450 MHz x 2 = "900 MHz" 704 MB of RAM 4x DVD burner 120 GB hard drive FireWire
I bought it back in '00 for about $2200. Over the years I've upgraded the RAM and graphics card and added a DVD burner and wireless card. It still remains responsive, even if I'm doing several things at once, like surfing wirelessly, listening to iTunes and burning a DVD. That's better than I can say for several much newer Windows systems I've used.
They need to lower the Mini's price. A lot. I'm a long-time Mac user but I ordered a Dell a few months ago since I needed Vista for the built-in speech recognition due to an arm injury. I really wanted to get a Mini and dual-boot Vista, but...
I ended up getting a Dell Dimension E521 with a dual-core AMD processor (2x 1.9 GHz), 2 GB of RAM, real graphics card (128MB ATI), 160 GB hard drive, DVD burner, modem, keyboard, mouse, built-in card reader and a 22" Dell LCD for $688 including tax and shipping. A Mac Mini with similar specs (but with a smaller monitor, and no card reader or no graphics card) is $1645 +tax.
Well, a comparably-equipped Mac Mini, with 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, DVD burner, keyboard/mouse and USB modem is $1,376 on Apple's site. And that doesn't include a dedicated graphics card or monitor. Figure $300 for a nice 3rd party monitor and that's $1,700, nearly $1,000 more....
I'm a Mac user, so I wasn't too thrilled about buying a PC either. But due to an arm injury I needed a machine with voice recognition that can take dictation. Vista has it and OS X doesn't, so I got the Dell.
It was time for a new computer anyway. Initially I was going to get a Mac Mini and dual-boot Vista, but it would've cost more than twice as much, even without a monitor...
From a Mac user's perspective, Vista is a damn sight better than XP or Win9x. It's still a little annoying, but you don't have to constantly tinker with it like you did with previous versions of Windows.
You can't argue with the value of the entry-level processors. I bought the system below a couple of weeks ago for $688, including shipping and tax. Dell had a coupon for $350 off any system $999 or more, so I played with the options until it was exactly $999, then applied the coupon.
Dell Dimension E521 AMD x2 3600+, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, nVidia 7300LE, 16x DVD burner, card reader, keyboard, mouse, Vista Home Premium, Dell 22" widescreen LCD
For a home computer, performance is great. Vista is nice and snappy and it runs everything I've thrown at it without any problems. I work at a university, so I bought a copy of Office Enterprise for $30 and it runs beautifully. The speech- and handwriting recognition works great and doesn't bog down the machine at all.
I just upgraded from my trusty old Sony Ericsson T610 to a Samsung SGH-T509 since the Sony's battery was shot and the Samsung was a free upgrade. The first thing I did was download Google Maps and Gmail onto the phone, but they throw up an error message about not having network access.
I emailed T-Mobile about it and they said they would unlock the phone for me. I haven't written them back yet. Will that fix it, or am I still stuck since I have the crippled firmware?
I switched to Mac in '00 and haven't looked back. In fact, the machine I purchased then, a dual-processor Power Mac G4, is still running great and is my primary machine at home.
Windows is rapidly catching up to OS X feature-wise, I'll admit. But each time I go home to visit family I end up fixing at least four Windows machines, despite the fact that I loaded them all up with AVG, Spybot, AdAware, and whatnot on my previous visit. A couple of years ago my sister told me that she needed a laptop for college. I told her I'd buy her one under one condition -- it had to be a Mac, since I didn't want to support Windows over the phone. Initially she was a bit reluctant, but quickly warmed to OS X and hasn't had one problem with her iBook.
I work at a university and my department has about 60 Macs ranging from iMac G3s to dual G5s to Core Duo Mac Minis. Most of them are used by students and they are not locked down at all aside from the OS X administrative password. I have zero problems with spyware, viruses, unauthorized programs or anything like that. All I do is run Software Update a few times a semester and they pretty much take care of themselves.
Yeah, I just bought a Sony 34XBR970 (34" widescreen CRT HDTV) -- was waiting until prices got into the 3-digit range. It has an HDMI port (and two component inputs). I bought a $15 DVI -> HDMI cable to hook my MacBook Pro to the TV. It works great...the computer immediately recognized it as a "Sony TV" and displayed the compatible resolutions. It will do up to 1920x1080 but 1280x720 looks the best.
Skip the home theatre section and look around the computer cable section for the best prices (I got mine at Fry's). The same cable from Monster was like $65.
We've purchased 18 Intel-based Macs at work over the past couple of months and haven't had any hardware issues. Most software works fine, too. At first we had a few issues with PowerPC software (MS Office, naturally) but recent system updates seem to have fixed 'em. We do have one custom OS X app that flat-out refuses to run through Rosetta.
We bought 16 Mac Minis, a MacBook and a 15" MacBook Pro (2 GHz). All are great machines, 'specially the MacBook Pro. The Minis are perfectly happy with Dell Ultrasharp monitors (15", 19" or 20" widescreen) and Microsoft mice (5-pack is $60!).
Performance is outstanding. I ran XBench and the MacBook Pro is slightly faster than a full-size dual 2.0 GHz G5 desktop in most categories (aside from hard disk speed, of course).
Temperature Monitor and a G5
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 1
The Mac OS X utility Hardware Monitor can play a tune on the G5's power supply by controlling the amount of load on the processors. Apparently the power supply makes different sounds depending on the load on it.
I don't know about that. If you shop around you can find some great deals. I recently finished up grad school and rented a 1 bedroom apartment in a swanky complex for $675 a month. It was fine while I got my feet on the ground but I was tired of throwing money away every month.
So I started house hunting. I found a nice, little old 2BR/1BA house on.4 of an acre right in the middle of the DFW metroplex for $63,000. I work at a university, which gave me access to zero-down home loans. Even with nothing down my payment is over $100 less than what I was paying in rent. I send the same amount that I was paying before in order to pay it off a little faster.
Granted, it's not new, but it's in great shape. I can't imagine paying $200,000 for a house when this one has everything I need.
My Sony DVD/SACD player will only output multichannel SACD sound via the analog 5.1 outputs. Fortunately I have an older Harman/Kardon receiver with matching 5.1 analog inputs. When I bought the DVD player a coupla years ago, I remember reading that the content producers had decided to disallow digital output of SACD over the optical or coax digital outputs.
I find this whole thing hard to believe. Each time the *IAA is shut down, they come back to the table with a more restrictive scheme. We've been using analog RCA connectors since the 1940s. Consumer VCRs have had them since the dawn of time. And it's not like analog quality is that great, either. I thought they'd decided to focus on protecting the HD video feeds and not worry about the analog stuff.
Oh, well. Guess I'll be holding on to my old-school, DRM-free PowerPC Mac and 5-year-old home theatre system for a good long while...
I'm the tech for a school newspaper... they started backing files up to CD in '96. This summer I backed all (100+) of them up to DVD and didn't encounter any that were unreadable, except those that were all scratched up. These haven't had any special care; they're just in jewel cases in a drawer.
I'm a firm believer in transferring files to the current format du jour every couple of years. Right now it's 4.7 GB DVD-Rs.
Yeah, I remembered that, but couldn't remember how much. Here's the spec from a FireWire expansion card--probably enough to run a DVD player at least.
FireWire Port Power 12 Watts/port (12V at 1A) - Each port can provide power to or draw power from attached devices as needed Cable Hops Up to 16 consecutive cable hops of 4.5 meters
Oh, they tried. Most high-end home theater equipment from a few years ago included a FireWire port. It's possible to daisy-chain everything together using only a single cable between devices. But, unfortunately, it has largely died out due to the lack of DRM.
Another benefit of FireWire is that it is possible to connect a cable box to your Mac and save digital versions of shows. That's probably another reason why it died.
Still another benefit is that you can connect a MiniDV camcorder directly to a compatible TV over FireWire.
It's kinda sad that this elegant technology wasn't embraced due to the lack of DRM.
Check out this pic of a home theater system. I found it a few years ago when I was in school. On the left is a regular home theater; on the right is a FireWire home theater.
Right. It doesn't cost me anything if someone uses my bandwidth. I've got "unlimited" bandwidth...so unless someone starts downloading terabytes of stuff it won't cost me anything.
On the other hand, someone using my car causes a real, tangible loss. Mileage, gas, physical wear and tear, etc all have a financial impact. My router and bandwidth are essentially a flat charge each month...
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, it is a little beefier specs-wise, but I have the Win 10 Pro 64-bit Preview installed on a Dell Inspiron 530 from mid-'07 and it is running great. It is a Core 2 Quad 6600 (2.4 GHz), has 6 GB DDR2 RAM, a 120 GB Crucial SSD (hacked BIOS re-enables AHCI that Dell removed), 1 TB WD Blue HDD and a 1 GB Radeon 6450.
It works fine, plays 1080p video with no issues but is loud and puts out a lot of heat (105 watt processor). I am looking forward to replacing it with an Intel NUC later this year when the Skylake models are released. About an 80% reduction in power consumption with better performance.
I've upgraded it with scavenged parts to 6 GB RAM (could use more but DDR2 is expensive), a 1 GB Radeon 6450, Crucial 128 GB SSD boot disk and a WD 1 TB data drive. It works great and is surprisingly peppy (I don't game on it, obviously). Originally it only supported 4 GB of RAM, but Dell put out a BIOS update a few years ago that bumped it to 8 GB. And there is a hacked BIOS out there that re-enables the AHCI that Dell removed so the SSD pretty much maxes out the 3 Gbps SATA port. Very impressed after adding the SSD - it boots up in about 10 seconds with 8.1 64-bit.
Yeah, I have had Charter in FW for going on 10 years and it's been good. The customer service had a bad period but has gotten good again. We had a storm come through a couple weeks ago; a neighbor's tree limb fell and took out our cable line. I called them at 9:45 p.m. on Saturday night, got a friendly, not-outsourced person who scheduled an appointment, then got a confirmation call from dispatch about 15 minutes later. The tech was there at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.
The actual internet service has always been solid with maybe one or two short outages a year. And this is different than in the past, but a modem is now included as part of the deal, so you don't have to lease one or buy one outright like with other providers. We have 60/5 (their slowest speed) for $39.99 (regular price is $59.99 when the promo expires) but if you call up and complain enough they will eventually give you a new promo.
I bought an Xserve for my all-Mac department at work (student publications at a big state university) a couple years ago and it has really been outstanding. It's simple to administer, made well, with nice attention to detail, and is reliable and easy to use. I doesn't do a whole lot aside from being a file server (no web serving or anything like that) but it has a heavy, 24/7 load from up to 60 concurrent users, most doing network-intensive things like building newspaper pages, editing D-SLR photos, archiving HD video, etc. It takes it like a champ and only gets restarted when there is a security update.
That said, we have used a dual G5 Power Mac tower with 10.4 OS X Server for a server box for our arcane old Mac-based accounting software for nearly five years and it has also been dead-nuts reliable. It runs 24/7 and also does some light web- and file sharing and has been trouble-free as well. I will be replacing it over the winter break with a new Mac Pro with 10.6 Server.
I installed Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit on my cheapo two-year-old Dell desktop (AMD 3600 x2, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 7300LE) and it is running beautifully. I had to wipe the drive since I had the 32-bit Release Candidate Installed, but that was painless. I just copied my user folder to an external drive, formatted the hard drive, did a clean install and then copied my stuff back. The install only took about 10 minutes! Copying my stuff back and forth was actually the most time-consuming part.
I think most people just have crappy stereos.
Over the years I have pieced together a modest setup in my house (Onkyo receiver, 6.5" Infinity bookshelf speakers and a 10" Cerwin-Vega subwoofer behind the couch).
It sounds pretty good to me, but it always blows away people who come over. It seems most of them use computer speakers or little mini-systems, and hearing music on a powerful, full-range system is sort of a revelation to them.
The first mini-USB device I bought was my Nikon D50 back in 2005. Then I bought a T-Mobile G1 in November and got a TomTom nav system for Christmas.
They all have mini-USB and it is so convenient. I can use the same car charger to power the TomTom and charge my phone, and I can use the same cord to connect all three to the computer. The G1 will also charge from any USB port so that is handy.
I have a dual 450 MHz G4 that still runs 10.4.10 beautifully. Any word on if my ol' girl will run 10.5?
If you take a little liberty with the processor speeds, my system meets all the requirements:
450 MHz x 2 = "900 MHz"
704 MB of RAM
4x DVD burner
120 GB hard drive
FireWire
I bought it back in '00 for about $2200. Over the years I've upgraded the RAM and graphics card and added a DVD burner and wireless card. It still remains responsive, even if I'm doing several things at once, like surfing wirelessly, listening to iTunes and burning a DVD. That's better than I can say for several much newer Windows systems I've used.
They need to lower the Mini's price. A lot. I'm a long-time Mac user but I ordered a Dell a few months ago since I needed Vista for the built-in speech recognition due to an arm injury. I really wanted to get a Mini and dual-boot Vista, but...
I ended up getting a Dell Dimension E521 with a dual-core AMD processor (2x 1.9 GHz), 2 GB of RAM, real graphics card (128MB ATI), 160 GB hard drive, DVD burner, modem, keyboard, mouse, built-in card reader and a 22" Dell LCD for $688 including tax and shipping. A Mac Mini with similar specs (but with a smaller monitor, and no card reader or no graphics card) is $1645 +tax.
Get some of this and stop worrying about HFCS.
http://dublindrpepper.com/
Well, a comparably-equipped Mac Mini, with 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, DVD burner, keyboard/mouse and USB modem is $1,376 on Apple's site. And that doesn't include a dedicated graphics card or monitor. Figure $300 for a nice 3rd party monitor and that's $1,700, nearly $1,000 more....
I'm a Mac user, so I wasn't too thrilled about buying a PC either. But due to an arm injury I needed a machine with voice recognition that can take dictation. Vista has it and OS X doesn't, so I got the Dell.
It was time for a new computer anyway. Initially I was going to get a Mac Mini and dual-boot Vista, but it would've cost more than twice as much, even without a monitor...
From a Mac user's perspective, Vista is a damn sight better than XP or Win9x. It's still a little annoying, but you don't have to constantly tinker with it like you did with previous versions of Windows.
You can't argue with the value of the entry-level processors. I bought the system below a couple of weeks ago for $688, including shipping and tax. Dell had a coupon for $350 off any system $999 or more, so I played with the options until it was exactly $999, then applied the coupon.
Dell Dimension E521
AMD x2 3600+, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, nVidia 7300LE, 16x DVD burner, card reader, keyboard, mouse, Vista Home Premium, Dell 22" widescreen LCD
For a home computer, performance is great. Vista is nice and snappy and it runs everything I've thrown at it without any problems. I work at a university, so I bought a copy of Office Enterprise for $30 and it runs beautifully. The speech- and handwriting recognition works great and doesn't bog down the machine at all.
The 2007 Corolla with a 5-speed manual transmission gets 41 US MPG on the highway, close to the Civic hybrid and Prius, for considerably less money.
I just upgraded from my trusty old Sony Ericsson T610 to a Samsung SGH-T509 since the Sony's battery was shot and the Samsung was a free upgrade. The first thing I did was download Google Maps and Gmail onto the phone, but they throw up an error message about not having network access.
I emailed T-Mobile about it and they said they would unlock the phone for me. I haven't written them back yet. Will that fix it, or am I still stuck since I have the crippled firmware?
I switched to Mac in '00 and haven't looked back. In fact, the machine I purchased then, a dual-processor Power Mac G4, is still running great and is my primary machine at home.
Windows is rapidly catching up to OS X feature-wise, I'll admit. But each time I go home to visit family I end up fixing at least four Windows machines, despite the fact that I loaded them all up with AVG, Spybot, AdAware, and whatnot on my previous visit. A couple of years ago my sister told me that she needed a laptop for college. I told her I'd buy her one under one condition -- it had to be a Mac, since I didn't want to support Windows over the phone. Initially she was a bit reluctant, but quickly warmed to OS X and hasn't had one problem with her iBook.
I work at a university and my department has about 60 Macs ranging from iMac G3s to dual G5s to Core Duo Mac Minis. Most of them are used by students and they are not locked down at all aside from the OS X administrative password. I have zero problems with spyware, viruses, unauthorized programs or anything like that. All I do is run Software Update a few times a semester and they pretty much take care of themselves.
Yeah, I just bought a Sony 34XBR970 (34" widescreen CRT HDTV) -- was waiting until prices got into the 3-digit range. It has an HDMI port (and two component inputs). I bought a $15 DVI -> HDMI cable to hook my MacBook Pro to the TV. It works great...the computer immediately recognized it as a "Sony TV" and displayed the compatible resolutions. It will do up to 1920x1080 but 1280x720 looks the best.
Skip the home theatre section and look around the computer cable section for the best prices (I got mine at Fry's). The same cable from Monster was like $65.
We've purchased 18 Intel-based Macs at work over the past couple of months and haven't had any hardware issues. Most software works fine, too. At first we had a few issues with PowerPC software (MS Office, naturally) but recent system updates seem to have fixed 'em. We do have one custom OS X app that flat-out refuses to run through Rosetta.
We bought 16 Mac Minis, a MacBook and a 15" MacBook Pro (2 GHz). All are great machines, 'specially the MacBook Pro. The Minis are perfectly happy with Dell Ultrasharp monitors (15", 19" or 20" widescreen) and Microsoft mice (5-pack is $60!).
Performance is outstanding. I ran XBench and the MacBook Pro is slightly faster than a full-size dual 2.0 GHz G5 desktop in most categories (aside from hard disk speed, of course).
The Mac OS X utility Hardware Monitor can play a tune on the G5's power supply by controlling the amount of load on the processors. Apparently the power supply makes different sounds depending on the load on it.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/HardwareMonitor.html
I don't know about that. If you shop around you can find some great deals. I recently finished up grad school and rented a 1 bedroom apartment in a swanky complex for $675 a month. It was fine while I got my feet on the ground but I was tired of throwing money away every month.
.4 of an acre right in the middle of the DFW metroplex for $63,000. I work at a university, which gave me access to zero-down home loans. Even with nothing down my payment is over $100 less than what I was paying in rent. I send the same amount that I was paying before in order to pay it off a little faster.
So I started house hunting. I found a nice, little old 2BR/1BA house on
Granted, it's not new, but it's in great shape. I can't imagine paying $200,000 for a house when this one has everything I need.
My Sony DVD/SACD player will only output multichannel SACD sound via the analog 5.1 outputs. Fortunately I have an older Harman/Kardon receiver with matching 5.1 analog inputs. When I bought the DVD player a coupla years ago, I remember reading that the content producers had decided to disallow digital output of SACD over the optical or coax digital outputs.
I find this whole thing hard to believe. Each time the *IAA is shut down, they come back to the table with a more restrictive scheme. We've been using analog RCA connectors since the 1940s. Consumer VCRs have had them since the dawn of time. And it's not like analog quality is that great, either. I thought they'd decided to focus on protecting the HD video feeds and not worry about the analog stuff.
Oh, well. Guess I'll be holding on to my old-school, DRM-free PowerPC Mac and 5-year-old home theatre system for a good long while...
I'm the tech for a school newspaper ... they started backing files up to CD in '96. This summer I backed all (100+) of them up to DVD and didn't encounter any that were unreadable, except those that were all scratched up. These haven't had any special care; they're just in jewel cases in a drawer.
I'm a firm believer in transferring files to the current format du jour every couple of years. Right now it's 4.7 GB DVD-Rs.
Yeah, I remembered that, but couldn't remember how much. Here's the spec from a FireWire expansion card--probably enough to run a DVD player at least.
FireWire Port Power 12 Watts/port (12V at 1A) - Each port can provide power to or draw power from attached devices as needed Cable Hops Up to 16 consecutive cable hops of 4.5 meters
Oh, they tried. Most high-end home theater equipment from a few years ago included a FireWire port. It's possible to daisy-chain everything together using only a single cable between devices. But, unfortunately, it has largely died out due to the lack of DRM.
Another benefit of FireWire is that it is possible to connect a cable box to your Mac and save digital versions of shows. That's probably another reason why it died.
Still another benefit is that you can connect a MiniDV camcorder directly to a compatible TV over FireWire.
It's kinda sad that this elegant technology wasn't embraced due to the lack of DRM.
Check out this pic of a home theater system. I found it a few years ago when I was in school. On the left is a regular home theater; on the right is a FireWire home theater.
Right. It doesn't cost me anything if someone uses my bandwidth. I've got "unlimited" bandwidth...so unless someone starts downloading terabytes of stuff it won't cost me anything.
On the other hand, someone using my car causes a real, tangible loss. Mileage, gas, physical wear and tear, etc all have a financial impact. My router and bandwidth are essentially a flat charge each month...