Stuff

On the topic of older PCs, Francie’s, first laptop, a 5-year old HP DV9000, was recently pressed back into service due to lack of resources at work (as if THAT’S anything new!). It’s one of the early Intel Centrino Duo systems with 2gig RAM. I decided to get it ready starting with a fresh install of a distro I’d seen called Crunchbang (#!). I was drawn to it by the claimed low resource requirements for running a modern/current kernel/base and it did not disappoint. I’d highly recommend this flavor of Linux to anyone looking for similar OS features. I’d summarize #! by saying that in the context of the current world of Linux DE fragmentation, it is to me at least, Debian done right.

Probably the oldest PC on the planet still in use, and the first one I ever purchased way back in 1985, the Zenith 486 is now undergoing it’s umpteenth upgrade/rebuild.

It started as an Intel 286-based machine.  Being a 2nd generation PC with the new, highly touted 16-bit ISA bus and 20 megabytes of hard disk storage space, it was a top drawer machine at the time.  It went to a 386 and finally became a 486 sometime in the late 80’s, IIRC.  It has sentimental value and continues doing file storage duties, albeit obviously limited these days.

In expected fashion for ancient hardware, one of the drives developed an error condition precluding NT4 from booting a couple weeks ago.  To me this is just an opportunity to add a 2nd SCSI adapter, stuff some more drives in there and see how it goes running a similarly ancient version of Redhat Linux.  I just happen to have a pre-IPO copy of 5.2 waiting to be re-used on the next iteration of the venerable Z-486.