Ok, so it's not the OLDEST system I've tried to fire up - that dubious honor goes to an old Compaq Portable that a friend of mine brought in to work about 7 or 8 years ago. It still ran, and someone was keeping some basic records on it.
But, of ones that I personally owned and put together - I don't think I had fired it up since maybe about 2011 or so, and I'd originally put it together I think in the 1999-2001 time frame, some from discarded parts, and some from parts I'd bought. That said, I fired it up today, it worked, and it shut down properly. I didn't do MUCH with it, though.
This system sports 192 MB of SDRAM, and an AMD K6-2+ 450 overclocked to 500 MHz and core undervolted to 2.0V. It runs Windows 98 Lite (95 GUI, 98 core system), and the dang thing still runs.
Really, though, it was just curiosity. I was planning on opening it up to dump the HDD contents. My Windows drives and Linux partitions on the drive all copied over.
EXCEPT: C:\Program Files\Java, and C:\Program Files\Common Files\Java. Something in each of those folders seemed to irritate the drive, and it would cycle with a click, then pause for a second, click, pause for a second, etc, while making no progress. I'd have to cancel the copy AND power the drive off to break out of that cycle.
I'm guessing that's a bad sector issue? I don't know. But, if so, first one I've EVER had.
Fun times - but, also, between this one and a Pentium III (or Celeron of that generation) 1GHz, also running Win 98 Lite, I've finally done the LONG overdue job of dumping those disks. Maybe in another few years, I'll get around to sorting through any useful data.
But, of ones that I personally owned and put together - I don't think I had fired it up since maybe about 2011 or so, and I'd originally put it together I think in the 1999-2001 time frame, some from discarded parts, and some from parts I'd bought. That said, I fired it up today, it worked, and it shut down properly. I didn't do MUCH with it, though.
This system sports 192 MB of SDRAM, and an AMD K6-2+ 450 overclocked to 500 MHz and core undervolted to 2.0V. It runs Windows 98 Lite (95 GUI, 98 core system), and the dang thing still runs.
Really, though, it was just curiosity. I was planning on opening it up to dump the HDD contents. My Windows drives and Linux partitions on the drive all copied over.
EXCEPT: C:\Program Files\Java, and C:\Program Files\Common Files\Java. Something in each of those folders seemed to irritate the drive, and it would cycle with a click, then pause for a second, click, pause for a second, etc, while making no progress. I'd have to cancel the copy AND power the drive off to break out of that cycle.
I'm guessing that's a bad sector issue? I don't know. But, if so, first one I've EVER had.
Fun times - but, also, between this one and a Pentium III (or Celeron of that generation) 1GHz, also running Win 98 Lite, I've finally done the LONG overdue job of dumping those disks. Maybe in another few years, I'll get around to sorting through any useful data.
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