Intellegent design.
I am wiping the drive on a old office computer for my wife. Its so old I am going to donate to Goodwill. Usually I fix it up and ship it off to a friend in need. This computer is so old I am not going to do that. Its an old HP Pavilion 8260 designed for Windows 95. Windows 95!
Here are the specs on this speed demon.
* 32MB RAM
* 266MHZ Pentium II
* 4.0 GB Drive (formats to 3.831GB)
* Windows 95
This computer has suited my wife at her work since she got the job MANY years ago. It was a computer they had around the office as the primary desktop for quite some time. I upgraded it from 95 -> 98SE 5 years ago or so. I had to put a new CDROM in it 3 years ago. Beyond that its run like a champ.
She used it to network with another computer and it ran Open Office fine albiet a bit slowly. The wife finally wanted to replace it after about 7-10 years of use after she got a printer that didn’t have a Windows 98 driver. I futzed with it to get the XP driver working but she decided as I was installing the XP printer driver to get a new computer.
We replaced it with a Acer Nettop that cost $200.
The acer nettop specs:
* 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 Processor dual core
* 1024 MB DDR2 RAM
* 160 GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
* Windows XP
She had no spyware or malware on the machine. Well, then again it was never hooked up to the internet. Which is the best way to keep a Windows 98 machine safe.
How am I wiping the machine? With an old Windows 98 boot floppy of course. I have one around for posterity sake. Though, I think it might be safer to wipe it using a Linux rescue CD.