Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

Menu

I have a shed full of PC’s

but when it comes to the crunch I can’t get any of them working. Not quite a shed full actually, just a few. At the top of the pecking order is my old laptop with its dead screen and no battery, and currently experiencing random blue screen crashes accompanied by hard drive noise. I don’t hold much hope for how much longer it is going to last so have been backing up data to an external drive during "uptime". So the idea is that a PIII 550mhz donated by father-in-law is in reserve. I decided to commision it the other night and besides sounding like a fridge, seemed to work OK until I installed XP SP2 and then it refused to speak to the internet. so I thought i’d stick suse linux on it, but it wouldn’t boot from CD and the bios is password protected… In reserve behind that another PIII 500 mhz with suspect motherboard and intermittent reluctance to recognize that there is a keyboard attached. Third in command an Athalon 300mhz that used to run nicely on red hat 8 until red hat 8 became unsupported and I raided it’s hard drive for a different machine. Bottom of the chain (and only because i’ve been to the tip recently) is a dog slow pentium 1 with a tiny hard drive, no fan on the processor, an ancient version of suse linux, maximum of 256 glorious colours and no CD-ROM drive or floppy drive. Last night it was the only one that worked, but… i’ve forgotten what the login password is..

I’m sure that I could knock something together between all of those, but having wasted two evenings now i’m reluctant to waste any more time, especially when work are providing me with something shiny that should be arriving next week 🙂