Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
I had an old system open today. I’ll call it Austin Powers because it lost its mobo. But anyway, it had 64 MB of RAM in it that I didn’t realize I had (I thought it had 32, or at most, 48). So I pulled out the four 16-MB SIMMs, opened up my P120, pulled its four 8-MB SIMMs, and replaced them. While Linux is OK in 32 megs if you set it up right (using a lightweight window manager instead of KDE or, worse yet, Enlightenment, pulling out the daemons that provide services you never use, such as BIND and sendmail), it’s a lot happier with 64. I still need to really optimize it, but for a P120 I’m very impressed. If I could get AbiWord to work with O’Reilly’s templates, I could use it to write books.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.