Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

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 (2x512MB 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.