Parts and stuff

Since Dubya must have forgotten to have global warming affect where I live, I took advantage of those gloomy, April-like, barely getting to the 60's days last week to go through my spare computer parts.

I threw out a CDROM (said manufactured in 1994 on it), a 120 MHz processor and board, some modems, a NIC that had the word 'sh*tty' written on it, some EDO RAM, some other small stuff like cables that don't attach to anything, and a case. I moved everything out of a crappy old NEC case, a case I had to hack of the back panels to make the board's ports stick out of and into a nice case with 4 bays and a working power button.

I still have a lot of parts, probably enough to put together two more PCS - one Pentium and one Pentium II. All told, excluding my wife's W98 PC, I have a P3 as my main workstation, running FC4; a P2 as an NFS server, running Slackware 10.0; and my laptop, still running (don't laugh) Mandrake 9.2. Since laptops are so fickle I am afraid to try anything new; if it ain't broke I am not going to fix it. I tried to upgrade once and that became a broken system. Anyway, I have two other machines that are idle at the moment. One is a P3 running Arch Linux 0.7.1 and the other is Pentium 200MMX, running FreeBSD 4.11-Release. That BSD box would be running but the HD makes a lot of noise. It boots up and runs but I think it's just a matter of time before it goes kaputt.

The idle P3 is a candidate for something, I just don't know what. I may try the latest FreeBSD on it. In the summer it's hard to spend an afternoon tinkering inside and, besides, next on my to-do list is getting my main desktop PC updated to either FC5 or Arch 0.7.2.