The Clock Ticks
So we have a number of computers hooked up to our router. Over the years as we upgrade to new computers the old ones all get shifted down the line. The new computer goes in the family room. In name this is my mother's machine. It is there for her to check her email, get her food network recipes and before her eyesight went out of wack to play the same solitaire game the old man first put on a 386 almost twenty years ago. This is the best machine as I need it to be able to run my games. (The mother gets lonely if I'm not in the room and there is only so much bad television I can stand to watch. I need to be able to game and close out the vast amount of stupidity coming at my through the television).
The next best machine goes into the spare bedroom (aka my father's space). This is the old man's machine. This machine must have a working CD and DVD burner at all times as well as a flat scanning device. The old man will spend hours browsing the internet saving information (Laws, population statistics, murder statistics of the 1890's, tank information, articles on judicial decisions, articles on history, articles about organized labor, anything from the library of congress, etc. )that he intends to read to then he backs the data up by burning it to disk. If the disk he is burning is not full he will add document and photograph folders to it, seemingly at random, until it is, even if he has backed up that folder ten times before. This is also the machine where the old man does his school work whenever he is going to school (Starting work on his second masters this fall). This machine is sacred. While at one time when it was the best machine I was allowed to mess with it (so long as we had copies of the restore disk readily available) once it migrates into the old man's domain it can be touched by him alone (and his sister should she be in town and sleeping in that room).
The Final machine on the network is the machine of parts, or my machine. After a machine leaves my father's domain it makes a slight detour to the basement, where we open it up and start playing Doctor Frankenstein. We add a second hard drive. We go through all our old ram to see if we can use any combination to increase it's memory. We make a trip to the computer parts wholesale shop and see what is on the discount rack and then we stitch the machine back up and see if it works. Usually it does we have just the right amount of geek knowledge. We usually keep the old operating system as windows XP is just to much of a resource hog to run on an old machine. Windows 98 did the job.
Once the machine is in my room virus and spyware protection are loaded and they are very much needed as the sole purpose of this machine is to let me try things I wouldn't dare do on any other. I can download a third party program and install it. I can browse adult material. I can type anything I want into a google search engine and feel free to click on every link that comes up. If the machine got loaded down with nasty hijackers or spyware I could do my best to clean it myself, or just wipe the entire thing and start fresh.
When Microsoft said they weren't going to support Windows 98 anymore I wasn't concerned between Webroot Spysweeper and Nortons antivirus I was covered. Then I got the email from Webroot saying that they too would on longer be supporting windows 98 operating systems. My machine is a dead man walking. Why just today I was reading an article that I found on Fark about a virus that is designed to attack your processor. My machine doesn't stand a chance without protection.
(One might think that I would stop using the machine is such risky ways as the situation stands. One wouldn't really know me very well if one thought that).
So it is a race against the clock. Will I buy enough parts (possibly a whole new motherboard and processor as well as ram) to make an upgrade to windows XP home edition (saw it on sale for just 98 dollars) or will the evil internet monsters turn it into a giant paperweight first!
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The next best machine goes into the spare bedroom (aka my father's space). This is the old man's machine. This machine must have a working CD and DVD burner at all times as well as a flat scanning device. The old man will spend hours browsing the internet saving information (Laws, population statistics, murder statistics of the 1890's, tank information, articles on judicial decisions, articles on history, articles about organized labor, anything from the library of congress, etc. )that he intends to read to then he backs the data up by burning it to disk. If the disk he is burning is not full he will add document and photograph folders to it, seemingly at random, until it is, even if he has backed up that folder ten times before. This is also the machine where the old man does his school work whenever he is going to school (Starting work on his second masters this fall). This machine is sacred. While at one time when it was the best machine I was allowed to mess with it (so long as we had copies of the restore disk readily available) once it migrates into the old man's domain it can be touched by him alone (and his sister should she be in town and sleeping in that room).
The Final machine on the network is the machine of parts, or my machine. After a machine leaves my father's domain it makes a slight detour to the basement, where we open it up and start playing Doctor Frankenstein. We add a second hard drive. We go through all our old ram to see if we can use any combination to increase it's memory. We make a trip to the computer parts wholesale shop and see what is on the discount rack and then we stitch the machine back up and see if it works. Usually it does we have just the right amount of geek knowledge. We usually keep the old operating system as windows XP is just to much of a resource hog to run on an old machine. Windows 98 did the job.
Once the machine is in my room virus and spyware protection are loaded and they are very much needed as the sole purpose of this machine is to let me try things I wouldn't dare do on any other. I can download a third party program and install it. I can browse adult material. I can type anything I want into a google search engine and feel free to click on every link that comes up. If the machine got loaded down with nasty hijackers or spyware I could do my best to clean it myself, or just wipe the entire thing and start fresh.
When Microsoft said they weren't going to support Windows 98 anymore I wasn't concerned between Webroot Spysweeper and Nortons antivirus I was covered. Then I got the email from Webroot saying that they too would on longer be supporting windows 98 operating systems. My machine is a dead man walking. Why just today I was reading an article that I found on Fark about a virus that is designed to attack your processor. My machine doesn't stand a chance without protection.
(One might think that I would stop using the machine is such risky ways as the situation stands. One wouldn't really know me very well if one thought that).
So it is a race against the clock. Will I buy enough parts (possibly a whole new motherboard and processor as well as ram) to make an upgrade to windows XP home edition (saw it on sale for just 98 dollars) or will the evil internet monsters turn it into a giant paperweight first!
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 1:19 AM
2 Comments:
Download and install Ubuntu linux. Runs great on old hardware, it's free, it's easy to use, and you won't get spyware or viruses.
Besides, you'll get to learn something new.
Bah. I was going to suggest that you try linux too, but he beat me to it.
So, try linux (any flavor, I'm not partial).
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