Every Thursday around 9pm I see a man in his mid-sixties riding his bike around my neighbourhood. At first I thought it was a bit odd to see someone of his stature riding around on a bike after the sun went down. While coming home late one evening I finally discovered why he was riding around so late, he was picking through everyone's trash. (Friday is garbage pickup day in my neighbourhood)
How does this relate to not throwing out an old computer? I'm getting to that. A friend recently picked up a computer at a garage sale for $5.00 CDN. The computer in question was a Celeron 533MHz with 64MB of RAM, and a hard drive over 10GB - more than enough to run a Linux server with a little work. This was someone's junk! With another 64MB stick Kev. could run a full blown Ubuntu desktop. (Though 256MB is starting to become a minimum)
I also picked up a "junk" machine. At work we strip anything less than a Pentium II 233MHz (which goes for $15CDN). This Pentium I 90MHz, 16MB of RAM, 1.3GB hard drive came in. What's great about this little box is that it's small, about the size of a size 12 shoe box, but a bit wider and about half the height. The box has no CD-ROM, but it might be possible to put a notebook-style cd-rom in it. Given my experience installing Linux over a network in the past, it didn't concern me that there was no CD-ROM. For those curious, the box has a model number: PDA-2000.
Of course I had to upgrade the box. I removed the Pentium 90 CPU and replaced it with a 133MHz CPU, and replaced the 16MB of RAM with 64MB. I left the 1.3GB hard drive because my plan is to build a simple game server. Lastly, I added a sound blaster, for no reason at all. Yes, the hardware sucks, but the convenience outweighs having a 2GHz processor inside.
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