So I have determined that the answer to the question "Does a six year old quad-core Dell laptop make a better streaming platform than an 11 year old dual-core store-assembled desktop with a dedicated graphics card?" is "No." Unfortunately.

You see, some may be aware that my current desktop "Vixen" is getting a bit long in the tooth, being state-of-the-art when I got it in 2007 but now being more state-of-the-ark over ten years later. Consequently, despite being upgraded with a bigger hard drive, a dedicated graphics card, and replacement of Windows with Linux Mint, Vixen can struggle to meet the demands of art streaming, requiring careful conservation of system resources. Which is becoming a bit of a pain in the proverbial.
Now Mrs Mayfurr's six year old Dell lappie "Lady Penelope" has been progressively acting up over the last few months - the DVD drive, wifi and Bluetooth are now munted - so when she got a new lappie for Christmas, I "inherited" her old one as the Ethernet and USB ports are fine and I'm normally working on a wired connection with Vixen anyway. My plan when I saw Lady P had four CPUs was that I could use it for art streaming, making use of a (slightly) more modern machine along with utilising two screens for simultaneously drawing art and following chat - something that on Vixen I have to do with copious quantities of Alt-Tab switching. It also helped ath Lady P was running Linux Mint 19.1, which flies along compared to the original Windows 7 installation, so I had high hopes of a successful outcome.

Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. Running Lady P in tandem with Vixen's current monitor was no problem, and neither was running Krita and my trusty 9 year old Wacom Bamboo tablet. Installing Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) was no problem either, and I migrated my configs over successfully. I ran the OBS autoconfig wizard (that's why some of my Picarto watchers may have got notification-spammed the other day), and was all set to try a demo stream on Picarto - 

- but once broadcasting Krita slowed to a crawl with MASSIVE lag in pen movement, all four of Lady P's CPUs were running over 90% occupancy, and her CPU temperatures climbed while the cooling fan was running flat-out. It appears that OBS took a look at the extra CPU capacity and said "I'll have that, thanks!" leaving nothing much for anything else, and the bog-standard integrated GPU simply didn't have the grunt to carry art operations at the same time.

So much for that idea. In the words of the poet: "Bugger!"

Nevertheless, "Lady P" will have some utility as a second machine as I can tether my Android phone to the laptop and run through the home WiFi if I need to use it out of the office/study (or just run it offline for doing art and writing). Vixen will still be my primary PC at home, though she will be replaced in 2019 owing to her increasing age. Right now Vixen is lying on her side so that the CPU heat-sink that fell off a couple of weeks ago can have gravity keeping it in place to keep the old girl going (the heat-sink clip separated with a loud thump, followed immediately by the CPU temperature alarm screaming before a full system shutdown seconds later).

So... do any streamers out there have any recommendations for the general sort of specs I should be looking for in a new box suitable for art stream broadcasting? I'm thinking at least a quad-core CPU, 8GB memory, and a dedicated graphics card (Nvidia for preference as their cards support Linux), but it's been yonks since I looked at this sort of thing.

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