Luxury
Monday, February 19th, 2007I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
- Monty Python’s Flying Circus - “Four Yorkshiremen”
Reading up on the hardware requirements for Windows Vista, and remembering how back in the “good ol’ days” Linux enthusiasts would brag about how little they could get along with (”Oh yeah, well I’m running X on a 386 with 8 Mb of RAM and a 200 Mb hard drive”), I tempted faith one recent sunday afternoon, and dug out my old Pentium II 350Mhz, 192 Mb RAM, 15 Gb harddrive PC, retired and collecting dust since 2003, and installed Windows XP with SP2 on it. And guess what - it actually worked quite well. Up and running, there’s about 90 Mb memory free, and I could surf, email and do some gaming too. Back when it was retired I had been playing among other things Half Life, Counter Strike and Everquest, so gaming’s a bit more that just minesweeper and solitaire. Memory is the Achilles heel of this rig, but to my surprise PC133 memory is still available at an affordable price, so if I had the inkling adding some more memory would be quite feasible.
Well, I don’t.
For a few moments I considered putting it to use by turning it into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) machine, but my hosting needs are not that great, and it would probably cost me more to have it powered on 24 / 7, than I currently pay for hosting. And with around nine years behind it, reliability will be an issue (probably sooner that later).
So this one is going back to the attic.