R
RayLopez99
I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB (yes two
gbs!) HDs and the 48 MB RAM. I found out how the RAM was configured,
after all these years: four sticks--I kid you not--of 16x2 and two
sticks of 8x2 = 32 + 16 = 48 MB. LOL.
And it ran fine Windows 2000. But it had a hard time running Linux
(among other things the CD-ROM was hard to mount). I tried Puppy, DSL
(had the best luck with this) and Mint. All with the same disastrous
results.
The graphics card was laughable. I think it was some 8 bit S3 Virge
or some such with the barest of video RAM--I did not bother to even
look. I forget if it even had a video card fan--I think it had a tiny
one, certainly nothing like the massive heat exchangers of today. 200
W or so power supply, but it got the job done. Floppy disk drive of
course, that hardly ever failed even though it was a decade+ old. No
blown capacitors. But again, Windows 2000 never had a problem with
this old hardware (since that was the OS, right after Windows 98, that
I targeted this machine for, proving that Windows works fine if you
have the right hardware for it).
I was just tired of having it around as a paperweight, though it
worked fine. I guess I could have donated it, but the HDs had data on
them and despite some freeware (CCleaner, an otherwise fine program,
could not completely wipe out the disk of data in Windows 2000), I
could not nuke the HDs (zero them out) using software...so I just took
a hammer to them, which short of using an electron microscope to
reconstruct data from shards works fine to clean your HDs of data.
RL
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB (yes two
gbs!) HDs and the 48 MB RAM. I found out how the RAM was configured,
after all these years: four sticks--I kid you not--of 16x2 and two
sticks of 8x2 = 32 + 16 = 48 MB. LOL.
And it ran fine Windows 2000. But it had a hard time running Linux
(among other things the CD-ROM was hard to mount). I tried Puppy, DSL
(had the best luck with this) and Mint. All with the same disastrous
results.
The graphics card was laughable. I think it was some 8 bit S3 Virge
or some such with the barest of video RAM--I did not bother to even
look. I forget if it even had a video card fan--I think it had a tiny
one, certainly nothing like the massive heat exchangers of today. 200
W or so power supply, but it got the job done. Floppy disk drive of
course, that hardly ever failed even though it was a decade+ old. No
blown capacitors. But again, Windows 2000 never had a problem with
this old hardware (since that was the OS, right after Windows 98, that
I targeted this machine for, proving that Windows works fine if you
have the right hardware for it).
I was just tired of having it around as a paperweight, though it
worked fine. I guess I could have donated it, but the HDs had data on
them and despite some freeware (CCleaner, an otherwise fine program,
could not completely wipe out the disk of data in Windows 2000), I
could not nuke the HDs (zero them out) using software...so I just took
a hammer to them, which short of using an electron microscope to
reconstruct data from shards works fine to clean your HDs of data.
RL