Yesterday I breathed new life into two very old computers
One of them, about 10 years old, is one we actually still use, although it’s a bit too old to run the Windows XP service pack 3 that was on it when we got it about 5 years ago, and Arch Linux + GNOME was freezing at times, especially when the browser was being used, and was also displaying fallback mode. The other computer has a default BIOS date of October 14, 1999, which I am guessing is the day the BIOS firmware was installed onto the motherboard. The CD-ROM drive appears to be broken, and it was therefore incapable of booting to anything but the hard drive running the same, even slower, Windows XP service pack 3 or a floppy disk. The 10-year-old computer has 512MB Ram, a 20GB hard disk and a Pentium iv processor that it claims runs at 2GHz, but feels much slower than that. The 1999 box actually has 224MB RAM, some of which was added later and is a different brand from the original, a 45GB hard drive, which I can only conclude was added at least 2 years later, and a Pentium 3 820MHz processor. Both of these machines are now running Arch Linux, and are quite happy to run a command shell, and even the XFCE desktop. I had to use a bootable floppy disk image with a USB driver to load Arch Linux, but once I got it installed onto the hard drive, it came up so fast I at first didn’t believe it could have booted so quickly. I then installed XFCE 4.10, and was still impressed with the boot time, and even the responsiveness of the base desktop system overall, including how much Orca far exceeded my expectations on such an old underpowered box. I’m still looking for a leaner browser and office suite to run on the oldest dinobox as I affectionately call it, which actually has the brand name “tiny” on both sides of the case, even though it is as large as my workhorse desktop that I bilt, but the slightly newer Del Optiplex looks like it will run Firefox and LibreOffice with less difficulty now that the desktop environment uses less resources, which are certainly at a premium on both boxes. It’s certainly good to know that although there is little I can do with the hardware on either computer short of rebuilding it from the motherboard up, it is still possible to run a decent modern operating system, and even some modern applications, on both of them.