Goodbye to the Nineties: a solemn moment
Sep. 13th, 2003 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI'm going to have a small ceremony to put to rest Odessa, my active Windows 98 drive.
It was hard coming to this conclusion. I'm still not certain I want this solution. However, it is still my best solution. I have been hanging onto an outdated OS because I wanted to be able to run old DOS programs from the Eighties and anything else I found. It only dawned on me today how little I use any of that stuff.
I've got mondo cruft in my computer. How much of the cruft do I even use? How much of my Windows side do I even touch? I act like my Win98 side is a museum -- I let it taste my new pieces of hardware and otherwise leave it alone.
My hard drive isn't old -- its 40 gigabytes were cutting-edge when I bought it two years ago. This was when 7200 RPM meant having to set up hardcore cooling tricks. This was also when I was running an already-old MMX and thus I couldn't get the drive to start unless I set the 32-gigabyte clip on. That's still there, two motherboards later. It inhibits the drive, but I can't remove it until I can wipe it completely.
All of the original parts of my first self-purchased computer are gone or retired. I replaced the mouse with a trackball immediately, but that was in 1998 when mice were serial and $50 for a trackball was a great price (I'd paid about $180 for a mouse and its bus card for my grammy's Apple IIe back in 1987). I stepped up the RAM from 32 MB to 128 in 2000 (that was a gift from my roomie), then to 256 about a year later. I added the new hard drive as Linux-only in July of 2001, only later ditching the 2.5-gig hard drive still running Win95. I put the monitor up for recycling, I reused the MMX and its tower for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
quinnclub so he'd stay alive.
I have no rational reason to be tied to that stuff. Of course, I am. I have to bury that stuff so that I can make a proper home for my next load of work. I can avoid my crufting and my family inclination to live in cruft.
Right now, I'm downloading CD-ROM images of Red Hat Linux version 9. It's maxing out the cable modem. When that's done, I'll burn, backup the partition onto an older drive, and start the new drive.
Tabula rasa had better equal sanity. When I'm done, this'll be a new machine.
-Heldscala, Dante
It was hard coming to this conclusion. I'm still not certain I want this solution. However, it is still my best solution. I have been hanging onto an outdated OS because I wanted to be able to run old DOS programs from the Eighties and anything else I found. It only dawned on me today how little I use any of that stuff.
I've got mondo cruft in my computer. How much of the cruft do I even use? How much of my Windows side do I even touch? I act like my Win98 side is a museum -- I let it taste my new pieces of hardware and otherwise leave it alone.
My hard drive isn't old -- its 40 gigabytes were cutting-edge when I bought it two years ago. This was when 7200 RPM meant having to set up hardcore cooling tricks. This was also when I was running an already-old MMX and thus I couldn't get the drive to start unless I set the 32-gigabyte clip on. That's still there, two motherboards later. It inhibits the drive, but I can't remove it until I can wipe it completely.
All of the original parts of my first self-purchased computer are gone or retired. I replaced the mouse with a trackball immediately, but that was in 1998 when mice were serial and $50 for a trackball was a great price (I'd paid about $180 for a mouse and its bus card for my grammy's Apple IIe back in 1987). I stepped up the RAM from 32 MB to 128 in 2000 (that was a gift from my roomie), then to 256 about a year later. I added the new hard drive as Linux-only in July of 2001, only later ditching the 2.5-gig hard drive still running Win95. I put the monitor up for recycling, I reused the MMX and its tower for
quinnclub so he'd stay alive.I have no rational reason to be tied to that stuff. Of course, I am. I have to bury that stuff so that I can make a proper home for my next load of work. I can avoid my crufting and my family inclination to live in cruft.
Right now, I'm downloading CD-ROM images of Red Hat Linux version 9. It's maxing out the cable modem. When that's done, I'll burn, backup the partition onto an older drive, and start the new drive.
Tabula rasa had better equal sanity. When I'm done, this'll be a new machine.
-Heldscala, Dante
