Is my old RedHat computer doomed?

Cluttering up my bedroom is an 8-year-old laptop with 192 megs of RAM
(yeah, it was pretty state of the art at the time) and a 6 gig
hard drive. It has Redhat 8.0 installed on it and it's a fine machine:
it is super-super stable and although it can't quite handle Firefox 2
it's the machine I use every morning to e.g. read the news before I get up,
and I regularly ssh to other machines from it to read mail etc.

I have been loathe to change the OS---why fix it if it ain't broke?
Upgrading from RH7 to RH8 in 2002 already cost me a lot in terms of
responsiveness. But now I am a bit concerned that it probably *is*
broke, and quite seriously broke, because of the recent DNS resolving
issue thing and reports yesterday that good sploits are now
circulating in the wild. I'm not so sure that RedHat are going to
come up with a security patch for an old RH8 machine. On the other
hand I am concerned that any major OS upgrade is going to do for
the machine completely. Do people have any advice (other than "buy
a new machine")? Can I patch the nameserver issue myself somehow
[note that *everything* is old: gcc 3.2, perl 5.8.0, etc etc]?
If I attempt to install a new OS am I likely to get a machine that
barely moves? etc etc.

Kevin

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is my old RedHat computer doomed?
    ... I have been loathe to change the OS---why fix it if it ain't broke? ... come up with a security patch for an old RH8 machine. ... boot from floppy then run off USB memory. ... mains supply) and that the hard disk is probably on its last legs. ...
    (uk.comp.os.linux)
  • Re: Switching off MULTITHREAD
    ... application to 'work', and MQ V5.1 'worked', then, if it ain't broke, ... why are you fixing it? ... I've always suspected an underlying problem since upgrading to MQ V5.1 ... The environment is such that it has to become 3) working and ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: FreeBSD 5.1 + nvidia-driver problem
    ... upgrading the FreeBSD box is something almost ... > You need cvsup and that's about it. ... I broke it the last time I tried... ...
    (comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc)
  • Re: repeating table rows should not be orphaned on a page
    ... [Microsoft MVP - Word] ... I guess I should be thankful, though, that this is one of the few things that Word 2007 broke (upgrading from Word 2003). ...
    (microsoft.public.word.tables)
  • Re: TOT Vista
    ... stick with an earlier version of Windows? ... If it is broke, what makes you think putting something else broke on it will fix it? ... If it's upgrading an existing OS installation then don't, upgrading an OS is always always always a bad bad bad idea. ...
    (uk.tech.digital-tv)