Das Oldskoolen!

[Blaze]

At work this evening, I came across a pile of stuff outside of one of the offices. An old, disheveled LaserJet Printer, a box of "Lotus Organizer: 1997" copies, whatnot. It was all marked as trash for me to pitch. In and among these things I found a small tower. A note on the tower marked it as, "Non-functioning. Junk. Throw away." Well, NATURALLY I couldn't let a little note get in the way of my Geek Curiosity.

I got some cables and a monitor and keyboard and all that and set it up down in the matinence room. It started up fine. Once I got to Windows (95, for those interested. ), I discovered the problem. The registry was farked from here to Seskatchewan. Even in safe mode, I couldn't do crap with it. But I KNEW a farked Windows registry was nothing. So, I reformatted the drive and brought it home. At home, I dug out our old Win95 CD and Downloaded a copy of Win95 2nd Edition boot disk. Reinstalling was a pain in the butt, of course. Trying to figure out exactly what freaking Dos Commands the generic CDROM driver wanted me to put in in what order to get it to run.

Finally, it runs. I'm now the proud owner of the following.

1 Mini-tower Windows 95 Machine
200 Mhz Pentium MMX
168 Megs RAM, Some PC-100, some EDO. ( I think they were trying to get it to run Quicken)
Intel PCI SVGA Graphics card capable of 256 Colors and up to 1024X768 Resolutions.
2 Gig Hard Drive
Onboard Sound
US Robotics 56K modem
A Network Card I haven't quite gotten it to see, yet
and a 4X CD drive.

I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to plop a bigger HD in there and use it as a File Server, or if I should just rig in the network card, give it a full Diagnostic, and use it for my old games?

Any suggestions?

[TheScaryOne]

You forget. Windows 95 was limited to 20 gigs per drive max?

Also I have "Ol' Ironsides", a Pentium 150, with 32 megs of RAM, 3D video card 16bit at 1024x768, 1.2 Gig drive, Soudblaster Vibra 16, NO MODEM! NO NETWORK!, 40x CD rom. I heart my old box. It runs all me old DOS games.

[grassmunk]

got a p133 with 48 megs ram. (thats oldskool)
http://www.philyoung.net/gallery/Screen ... een?full=1
http://www.philyoung.net/gallery/Screen ... 204?full=1
Use to run win98se but wanted something a little more uptodate. Installed vectorlinux on it and its been running like a champ ever since.

[Teranfirbt]

I gave my old P133 to charity, but I've still got a P166 in the other room.. I'd use it to play old games, and yes, FAT16 won't let you go above 2 gigs per drive.

[Infin8Cyn]

Liiiiiinnnnnnnnuuuuuuuxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[Blaze]

On THIS system, I'll consider it.

Just got the Network card up and running. Next step is to see if my old Voodoo2 1000 is operational.

[Infin8Cyn]

Hells yeah!
Voodoofiles.com > j00.

[Brian]

These systems are ideal for things like LiveCD Linux distros - screw having a hard drive, who needs it?

[Vektor T. Gecko]

That's Argon, my p200MMX that sits in me room and keeps me company at night.
It's running debian linux with a minimal wm (blackbox), and basically I use it for personal file storage (mostly just a backup for small scripts and stuff), some network monitoring (ping to a bunch of sites, graphed using MRTG) and such.

It's also housing my longest-surviving hard drive (surprisingly, a Quantum Bigfoot CY), which has been in active use for the better part of a decade.

Aside from that, I just use it as a VNC client to access my more competent computer downstairs, which is capable of running web browsers and IM clients without grinding to a halt (Argon only has about 64MB o' RAM)

EDIT:
Yes, that's a 80486 microprocessor glued to the front of it, next to the giant yellow badge.

[peter-griffin]

Circa '97 p100mhz with a whopping 128mb of EDO and a 1.87gig harddrive - that's my beast right there. It is my most reliable machine, chugging along on '95 with it's original harddrive still entirely operational. I hardly ever use it - it even lags in StarCraft - but methinks it might be worth money someday.

[RadicalDreamer]

My dad gave me an old p400 mhz yhat was laying in his company's "Maintainence" room. Afterblowing the dust out of it, I saw it had some pretty nifty specs.

Pentium III 400 mhz
52x CD drive
256 megs o' RAM
Sound Blaster Live!
Unsure of the video card

Problem is, the moniter's dark and it runs on windows 2000 (ugh.)

[Zero_Point]

Recently, a local university had an auction, and you know what happens to the stuff they don't sell. They throw it away. Good thing my friend and I decided to swing by to check it out. I scored a 350W P4 power-supply, but didn't have room for a HUGE new tower case. Anyway, here's the real treat from the heap:
My friend's "New" comp:
Pentium III 833 MHz
Raid-ready motherboard
New case
new 250W power-supply

The rest of the stuff was stripped (naturally), but he had RAM and some extra HDD's laying around, and he is now the proud new owner of a PIII system. Lucky prick. All I got was a power supply and a "new" motherboard with VGA slot that won't fit in my current case because Compaq sucks.


Oh, as for old:
Compaq 486 *insert some numbers here*. My friend took it for a Linux box, but he couldn't boot it.

[FireAza]

My Scrapbox ow3ns you all!
1.3GHZ AMD Duron prosessor
256MB DDR RAM
Some crappy ASUS MB
Tiny case which causes the processor to overheat if the vid card is too large
Geforce 2 MX100 (32MB)
2x 6 GB HDs
Old Realtek network card

I could totally run Warcraft III on that.

[grassmunk]

I thoug this was 'das oldskoolen' not 'das ghetto'? ( speaking of ghetto, my dads comp was a 333 with 128 megs of ram. Onboard EVERYTHING, and the mobo cost 30 bucks! we had ram/cpu/hdd lying around. The funny thing is that machine was better than ours when it came to reliability, greap little mobo )

[Blaze]

Yes, where did we get our Getto machine listings from? We're talking OLD!