Watt's Up

Over the past few years I’ve been collecting old computers. Some have been mine and others have been my children’s. They have now gotten to a critical mass of four and I think it’s time to get rid of some of them.

Left to right: my cream-colored Gateway 300Mhz, Justin’s silver homebuilt from his college days, Matthew’s black Dell Dimension 8100 from his college days, my cream-colored homebuilt 800Mhz AMD AthlonI’ve selected one (Matthew’s old desktop machine) to be my next Linux system (previously I was using my Athlon machine). However, Matthew’s machine only has 128MB of memory and is seriously strapped performance-wise because of it – for example, no X-windows. Yet it’s the best of the bunch since it has a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. The downside is that it requires PC800 RDRAM memory which is expensive. While doing other things I’ve been sitting on eBay today bidding on 1GB (2×512MB sticks) of memory for it.

Now I have to get rid of the the other three junk machines. So today I’m also sitting here running Darik’s Boot and Nuke program from a CD on the Athlon machine. Running this program is not just a simple minute or two process. So far a 40GB drive took about 3 hours whereas two 20GB drives took about an hour each. Right now I have started a 20GB drive, and have a 30 GB and a 6GB still to do. You have got to have patience doing this.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.