I am repairing a pc for a friend. It is a 200mhz K-6 with 64mb ram and an NLX mobo. The hard drive died. The friend I am fixing it for only wants it for surfing the net, e-mail and some word processing. They want to know what is the lowest priced hard drive I can get for it. The lowest priced one I can find, from a place I trust(Newegg), is $50 for a 20 gig or a 40 gig. There are some lower priced ones on Pricewatch, but I'm not sure as I don't know anything about the reputation of the vendors or their $35 drives.

My opinion: Even if I keep labor low, not worth fixing at any price. Just too slow and too old. I think they would be better off getting one of those $200 desktops off of Wal-Mart.com or from Fry's Electronics and letting me put Windows on it if they really want to save money.

Your opinion?

maybe a second hand 10 gig drive. considering this is a linux forum why not put linux flavour on it? other wise win98 se would run nice enough.

I happen to have a second hand 8 gig laying around. I'd love to put Linux on it, but they are Windows people and I really don't want to have to educate them.

I'd say just go with the secondhand 8G drive. Don't need 20-40G for email and surfing As long as the 8G has some life left in it, stick it in and install Windows. It'd be a shame to let such a decent machine go to the landfill!

yeah just put in the 8 gig and scan disk if windows likes enuf of the clusters on the disk it should run fine for the purposes they need it for.

I don't think win98 would run nice on ANYTHING. As much as I enjoy Win NT/XP, 98, esp, SE is a piece of garbage. Hell, I took EXCELLENT care of that thing and it crashed every five seconds. And my computer was a lot better than that.

As far as your situation goes, that system is fine for linux, providing you don't run KDE or GNOME. If you need a desktop, try XCFE. Otherwise use black/flux/white box or icewm.

My roomate had Win98 once where he went about 200 days without a reboot.. So I'd think in your case it was OE.

Damn. No kidding? That's amazing.

Did he actually use the computer, or just leave it sit there? Either way it's unheard-of. I've had 98SE crash within minutes of a fresh install, while most of my friends have said Windows is fairly stable in their experience. Maybe I didn't invoke the proper deities and make the requisite animal sacrifices...

Oh he used it, played games on it too.. big StarCraft freak..

Uhhh... didn't you know. You've got to send $605 to Redmond, Washington to use it properly each month, in order to accomodate for their services. Jeez, I guess some people can't read the instructions.

thats odd.... I installed windows 98 se for a friend and i got an error message even before the OS loaded there was a file missing on the cd.... gotta love the quality control in redmond.... not that they actually have ever heard the term Quality in reference to one of their products

in regards to a cheap hard drive.... ebay is your friend. I got a very nice 40gb Western Digital for only 40 bucks

you just have to look around.

Something like this?

hahahahahaha ha ha ha ha ha h ha ha

that one too.... it was a error loading a vbx file or something in the startup