This 6 year old PC that sends you these bits is starting to reach its limits. 700MHz and 256M RAM will only get you so far, it seems, and I think it has been lucky to get this far.
I scored a new motherboard and CPU the other week (FreeCycle: the price is right) but have no idea if it works or how well. It’s a 1.4 GHz CPU so that would be an improvement. 2 RAM slots, with a max of 2Gb. Any recommendations on sources for cheap, reliable 168 pin DIMMs? Seen some on eBay that bear watching, so perhaps that will work out.
I have another case to set it all up in (an old Gateway system that used to run Linux, back in the day). It’s day — 233 MHz — has long been done. There are 2 drives in it — a 2 Gb and a 6 Gb, but I have my doubts how useful they are.
Here’s how this box is currently laid out:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ad0s1a 97M 62M 27M 70% / /dev/ad0s1f 7.0G 6.1G 302M 95% /usr /dev/ad0s1e 19M 15M 3.0M 83% /var procfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /proc /dev/ad1s1e 72G 58G 8.4G 87% /opt linprocfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /usr/compat/linux/proc
Based on that, I could see / and /var fitting on the 6Gb drive, and if I had slots in the various IDE controller channels, I could perhaps use the 20 and 80 Gb drives I have as well. I need a slot for the CD drive, I guess. Or I could just keep it as it is, with two drives.