I tend to use a lot of older equipment around here. The fastest server at Casa de Bit is a PII/400 that I’ve cracked up to around 700 or so with some added cooling. The other two are PII/400’s.
I’ve got a “toaster” called “Gopher” that’s a Pentium/166… an old IBM model 300XL. Yes, a slug for most things, and most people wouldn’t bother with something so slow. For me, it watches the firewall, and all the network resources and the website, and pages me on my phone if there’s trouble with any of them. Well within the old boy’s ability, and yet cost me next to nothing to build up. It’s been running for years, that way.
My usual trick with these things is to ‘full house’ the system with RAM, give it a nice vid card off Ebay, a sizeable drive (I’m working off a stack of referub’ed 20gb Maxtors I got for $40 summer before last, just now), and put it in service.
Parts are cheap, and when they’re set up that way, the performance for what these things do is more than acceptable. Besides, I get a kick out of it. I pay for the parts, but I’ve not bought a PC except for my main desktop, in years. (Being in PC support has it’s advantages) Cheap, that way, and it keeps my repair skills sharp, too.
Most of the time I work on IBM stuff, because I know it best. But for a change, my current project is working on restoring a Dell L700CX to service. (PIII/700)
It’s no speed demon, but it’ll make an OK automation machine. FTP and so on.
It’s actually working OK now, but I’m curious… It looks like it’ll handle a Coppermine proc, which would give me another 250MHz of bandwidth. A worthwhile project. Anyone tried this one? Is anyone aware of what the last BIOS upgrade is for this box? Any mods available for more than the stock max of 512mb?
Send me some feedback if you can help. Thanks.
