Don’t look now but here’s another actual, in-use machine defying conventional wisdom and continuing to serve proudly, even at the ripe old age of 10+ years: Bungo Pony‘s garage jukebox.
Speak now if you think you can trump it: A 133Mhz Pentium machine with 128Mb and a entire battalion of DVD drives, USB expansion cards, you name it … playing tunes in the garage with the help of DSL.
(Also note that bumping the memory from 42Mb to 128 did not improve performance, as I have also suggested on this humble blog. You add-more-memory zealots need to rethink your religion. 😈 )
In all a lovely machine and a true warrior. Thanks for mentioning it. A gold smilie for Bungo Pony: 🙂
Motho ke motho ka botho 
(More memory’s much cheaper than a new cpu though…
Whether it improves performance surely depends on what task you’re trying to perform?)
Adding more memory DOES improve performance – to a point. Where that point lies depends on other factors, primarily the tasks you set the machine. For a machine dedicated to a particular task like these, adding more RAM beyond that needed to accomplish the task is basically worthless. For desktop machines however, with which users are constantly interacting and which often run multiple applications at a time, more RAM will help until it becomes large enough that most application data can be cached in it (for a typical ubuntu GNOME desktop this is likely in the 1-2GB range).
Hey, thanks for the mention! I showed up here just doing a search on my blog URL.
Got a small update on the Garage PC: It’s still chuggin! However, I’m building a new machine to take over the task. I live in Canada and the temperatures here can hit -30 degrees. DVD drives don’t work very well when it’s this cold. I usually get at least two of them failing at this point.
So, that’s why I’m building a new one. I’ve actually put some money into modifying a Pentium 200 MHz computer to be more robust for our nasty winters. I’m just waiting for 8G flash drives to drop a bit more in price, add a few hardware modifications, and then the machine will be good to go. I’ll put an update on my blog once it’s finished.
Again, thanks for the mention!