yeah right , it just occured to me know since you mentioned it , well sorry for the case and power supply it gotta go too ...

HAHAH , well what did you expect buddy ?
i mean whatever this dinasaur is gonna end up as is definitely going to be VERY far from optimal or even usable at least in a modern context .
but you gotta admit that it's even far more crazy to run this beast as is , besides the OP seems to be keen on an adventure (at least i got that impression).

well most certainly a lot , just listen to the freaking noise they generate along with all the heat!
this machine could be well suited as a heater perhaps ...LOL

cheers

I don't know much about electronics, but I think that's mistaken. Whenever I've worked with older computers, I've noticed how they often have very small heatsinks. Sometimes they don't even have fans attached to the heatsinks. Compare that to modern computers which always have CPU fans, PENIS, very big heatsinks, the motherboard chipset almost always its own heatsink, the video hardware often has its own heatsink and fan, and one or two case fans in addition to the power supply fan. I think if an old computer is noisy, it's probably just because the fans are old or otherwise bad. The loudest part of an old computer is usually the hard drive.

Maybe DSL?

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i...e_Requirements

Maybe it used 37MB for your setup, but there are more than one sceenshot on the forum post I linked to with people idling at 10MB.

I might try to find the version I d/led a while ago, I'm sure that it was idling at under 20MB with the junkbox I tried it on.

Kolibri isnt going to have anywhere near as much software as you can get eaisly with linux distros, but it should work on the old clunker at least.

Not exactly true....

Even an old P133 would be more than enough to use as a router. Not a great use for the system, and it would eat moer power than a modern stand-alone router, but still...it would do the job just as well.

It would make a great old dos gaming system, and could even play a lot of win9X games well.

The OP didnt seem to be after an 'adventure' to me, it looked more like they wanted to fix up the old machine and give it away.

What, a P133?

I take it you havent run one, or if you did it was a long, long time ago.

Pentium/Pentium MMX CPUs use a very small amount of power, and output very small amounts of heat. The RAM/chipset/video cards in those old systems dont use much power or create much heat either. You're probably thinking of P4s, now they did use a lot of power and create a lot of heat.

Generally right.

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I see comments like this often and every time I have to wonder. Who cares about the used RAM when the machine is idling? I mean, no one sits before his computer and watches it idling. Important is how much RAM is used when the machine runs the typical workload. And I doubt that it will be fun to do word-processing or graphical work on that machine, it will swap like hell.

True, not many people will sit and watch a machine idling. There are always a few though, and some people go alot further, like this guy-

http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm

If we were talking about a more modern machine with a reasonable amount of RAM, idle RAM use is not normally worth worring about. When you start looking at machines with minimal amounts of RAM, it does matter far more.

I wouldnt try any 'graphical' work on that machine (unless you count circa 1985-1999 games as 'graphical work'). Word porcssing, it might be possible to use some fully fledged word processor on that amount of RAM, I dont know for sure, its been a long time since I've used a machine with less than 48MB of RAM.

It would be easy to do basic document writing with a text editor, save in .txt or .rtf formats, then move the finished work to a school/uni/friends system for spell checking and/or formatting. I used to do the same thing when I had machines in that speed class.

Yeah right , you also forgot to mention that you could use it as calculator as well ...LOL
MS-Dos and Win9x games ? seriously that's not what i consider usable.. not in the least, besides how exactly is that supposed to be an upgrade considering that it already runs win98?

Yes Indeed it's been ages . 15 years or so since the mid/late 90's ...

but nonetheless my recollection of it , was it always blowed heat like a torch and the case would get hot enough within 2 hours to fry eggs on it (okay now i'm lil bit exaggerating)

but even if i'm mistaken, a p133 is still far less energy efficient in comparison to anything you would buy now , because you can't just look at the size of the heatsink or the amount of immediate voltage that they suck , but instead you've to consider how much energy they consume in contrast to the output (i.e how many IPS) , a P133 would take several minutes to boot win95 on average while a P4 would do that in seconds , even if the P4 consumes four times more energy it's still more energy efficient ;p

KaChing

cheers

Try this redhat 7.2 It will run on an old system with not much ram..

http://legacy.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/

What you consider 'usable' wasnt what you asked. I answered your question. There are quite a few 'retro' gamers around. I've recently sold one of ISA sound cards I had hanging around (an AWE 32) that somebody has installed in an old P233 MMX system for playing dos/win9X games.

BTW, the OP was never after an 'upgrade'. They were after a distro that would run on the P133/32MB setup they have, and I'm guessing they intend to give it away). I dont see how getting new everything counts as an 'upgrade' anyway, thats a new system (apart from possibly a CD drive and HDD, which would save maybe $50 and really hurt the way the system would run).

The Penitum 90-233 cases can get a bit warm, but thats more to do with low effiency power supplies and nil squared airflow in most AT cases than the CPU/motherboard/RAM/etc..

True, you cant just look at the heatsink or voltages. If you wanted to run something like audio/video encoding, etc.., the P4 would do it much faster. It would probably be enough faster that even with teh P4 drawing well over 5 times the power at full CPU load that it would work out more efficient.

Running anything within the capabilities of the P133 would make the P4 far less efficient. The P4 CPU alone will eat twice as much power at idle than a P133 at full load.

About the only thing I would use an ancient box like that for is a headless firewall... like IPCop... and then only with limited functionality.

http://www.ipcop.org/
http://www.ipcop.org/1.4.0/en/quicks...uirements.html