Re: Is my old RedHat computer doomed?

Kevin Buzzard wrote:
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.

Invest in a RAM upgrade. I'd imagine the thing would be able to take at least 512MB. It probably won't cost all that much if you get it online. Ebay's probably a good bet for secondhand RAM that will work with it.

My laptop before last was built in about 00 and i upgraded that to 512MB - that was a while ago, but as far as i remember i bought the RAM from ebay. It will last you for another 8 years if you upgrade the RAM now!

Then install the latest Fedora. ;-)



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