OFF: RE: HW: Mission Control: New Orders

Paul Mather paul at GROMIT.DLIB.VT.EDU
Fri Feb 8 11:54:36 EST 2002


On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Jonathan Jarrett wrote:

=>         It's a DX-2-66, actually. Did that sneer hurt when you came to
=> remove it? But anyway, yes, I probably could find such a machine, but that
=> $100 or British equivalent is (on my postgrad researcher's income) two to
=> three weeks' travel, two weeks' food, or 4 CDs, all things I'd rather have
=> than a P400 which would (since I have no other OS to hand[1]) have to run
=> Win 3.1. Okay it would go like Goldenrod but it still wouldn't run
=> anything this one won't.

Hey, I thought I was the only person still using a 486DX2/66!  My PC
Clone hardware is an old IBM ValuePoint PS/2 system that someone gave to
me.  (Actually, I suppose it's not actually a PC Clone but a "True Blue"
IBM, come to think of it.:)  I run FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE on it (now FreeBSD
4.5), which I track regularly.  So, ironically, even though the hardware
is ancient, the operating system is likely more up-to-date than that of
90% of people on this list. ;-)

For the same reason as you ($100 could better be spent elsewhere), I am
loathe to support the WinTel mindset of upgrading hardware every six
months or so just to keep up with bloatware.  (Usually I just wait for
people's freebie cast-off hardware.;)

=> [1] And I wouldn't run Win95+ without the actual disk! Because, that's
=> Microsoft's copy-protection in the day of the CD-ROM isn't it? It's so
=> unstable that if you don't have the CD one crash will make it
=> irrecoverable...

Haven't you heard, Jon, Win98 is the minimum Microsoft will support
nowadays.  (Even then, for how much longer?  I don't even think they
will let a new PC ship with it any more.)  It won't be long before they
have everyone running XP (spyware et al.)

Welcome to the future...

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa



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