My first laptop was a nice, slick, black Compaq Armada. I forget what model; it may have been an M600, or something like that. My mom bought it for me, as a birthday present, in my second semester of college, and it almost made it the 15 months to my graduation. The screen died, and I was not quite yet the computer/Linux/1337 haxor that I am now. In fact, at the time, I was running Linux, but it was Smoothwall, on a second pc, just so I could share a dial-up connection between my desktop computer and this laptop.
Fast-forward a few years, now I'm an underpaid Excel specialist, with access to tons of old hardware, which I love. So, one day, I come across a 366MHz PII Compaq Armada 1700. This was a temporary joy, as my company was obliged to dispose of it, but that was not the end of my quest. For anyone that knows me, they know that finding and buying a 1750 online for $50 is not shocking. Why, because I have a Thinkpad T410, issued by my employer, which I could upgrade to a T430, but I would prefer to fiddle away on the 600e that one of my college mates gave me years ago.
I love playing with old hardware; you know, the stuff that you want to throw away, because Firefox opens in 7 seconds instead of 3. What I can do with a 366MHz PII, 128 MB RAM, 20GB of hard drive space, and Linux is an adventure of exploration. Should I set up a firewall, a file server, a print server, a DNS cache, a proxy server/web filter, or a VPN concentrator? How about a command line based workstation, capable of playing mp3's, browsing the web, and such? What about combining all of them?
Any ideas are welcome. Suggestions to install Windoze will be met with ridicule.
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