the corner office

Tinkering done; finally booted up the old PIII 500 after it being out of commission since mid-2002.

When the machine's motherboard died, we'd quite simply forgotten about the hard drive, and so there I was, looking at The Machine That Time Forgot.

Running... Windows 98!

Two years doesn't sound like much, but man... I haven't touched Windows 98 since late 2002. It's so cute!

It's also so unstable... already had one blue screen (will our kids ever believe us?) - and I forgot how darned irritating it can be to have to reboot a machine every time you tweak a network setting. I'd forgotten about the old dreaded "win98 won't shut down" bug. Indeed, we've been spoiled with Win2k and XP.

I'm having a real stroll down memory lane. This machine had Netscape 4.7 installed! Oh. My. Gawd. I updated the virus definitions. That took a while. Over 6,000 new viruses since my last update, Norton Antivirus proudly told me. Is that all? I don't think I'll ever be needing to use the old 5.09 Domino server again, either. The machine used to dual boot SuSE 8.0, but neither Ronwen nor I can remember the root password (how's that for secure ;-), and since we never really stored any important files on the Linux partitions, they're going bye-byes as soon as we do a clean install on the machine.

In fact, I'm not quite sure whether to keep Windows 98 on this machine or to brave a slightly newer OS. I've come to realise that there's a lot to be said for 2k/XP's stability, but I suspect that this old PIII is best served with a nice fresh Win98 installation, no more, no less. With 224 megs of memory it'll be quite usable as a mail-and-spreadsheets machine for the missus, at least until the blessed day when I shell out for the AMD64 I've been coveting for months. That's currently on the losing end of the slightest sliver of "this is a luxury I can't justify" caution.

The frightening thing is that 4 short years ago, this old dog of a PIII was my primary workstation, and running 2 or 3 R5 clients running disk-crunching agents and a Designer client and an Admin client and a Domino server and various Office applications all at the same time, and it handled. I don't remember ever thinking to myself "hmm, a 64-bit AMD with 2 gigs of memory on an 800Mhz front side bus would make my life so much more productive than it is now."

Then again, there was a time when my old 200MMX felt like quite the beast. Nowadays it feels sluggish at a bash prompt. I'll drink the upgrade Kool-Aid for a while longer, methinks.