Re: Is my old RedHat computer doomed?

[Will Kemp <will@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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