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<p>Tom,</p>
<p>I have one like yours. Wiped the disk years ago and have run
Xubuntu on it since. Wrote a few articles, to offset my cost. The
kids used it with Linux as early-teens. Worked pretty well. A
little slow, still a solid machine.</p>
<p>Keeping it first edition XP makes sense to me. You might just
grab a small SSD, put Linux on it and run it as is. Save the XP
disk for future sale, nostalgia, faith, investment or whatever.
Plug it back in as needed. <br>
</p>
<p>Nice to see some love for the "old" hardware. Now the early Pi
and Arduinos are old. Uggg.</p>
<p>drtorq<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 7/18/19 1:25 PM, Tom Henderson via
Ipg-smz wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:52e30dc5-f4ad-adb4-f5c8-8f7188270cc3@extremelabs.com">Fellow
Guilders,
<br>
<br>
This is a tome about resurrecting an EEE Asus system that hadn't
been turned on since 2012.
<br>
<br>
The short background is that this system was owned by a fellow who
died in 2012. His widow contacted me to donate his stuff to our
ham radio club. In the mix was an EEE, which had been updated in
2012 but otherwise it had been unused, and I mean zero data. It
has a 900mhz CPU and an amazing 2GB of DRAM. It's roughly
tablet-sized, and has Windows XP on it, and not Windows XP SP2--
the point where Microsoft implemented the concept of "user space".
XP SP2 broke a lot of software and drivers. It also terminated the
ability for quite a bit of legacy amateur software (and so much
more) to work. This was a rare beast.
<br>
<br>
I found a charger for it (Universal, $11), and plugged it in. It
took a while to think about it, then XP finally arrived with an
Admin logon, no password. I had envisioned turning this into a
Xubuntu machine, but there is a LOT of ancient ham radio software
that runs on XP and does not run on XP SP1+ at all, no matter how
you hold your mouth, or dance on one foot whilst whistling Stephen
Foster tunes.
<br>
<br>
The question is, do I connect it to the big bad Internet, update
it, or sell it at a hamfest as a place to use old and relic
software? It's behind NAT and a stateful firewall.
<br>
<br>
On one hand, I'd like to see it nominally secure (if updating is
even still available from Microsoft), and on the other hand, you
can play Duke Nukem I all day long, or learn Morse Code on a
freeware 1996 DOS 16 bit program, etc, etc. Should I connect it or
is its value undisturbed better?
<br>
<br>
Votes?
<br>
<br>
Tom
<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
--------------------------<br>
Rob "drtorq" Reilly<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:doc@drtorq.com">doc@drtorq.com</a><br>
407-718-3274<br>
------------l-------------<br>
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