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Actually, you run Win95 somewhat ok on a 386-16 with 8MB of 30-pin SIMMs from 1985, but it would have been top of the line for that year (some boards had 8 ram slots, 1MB modules were available). That OS did have a means to install from around 40 floppies. 4MB modules are still available, so it's possible to resurrect the dead.

The world's slowest WinXP box runs at 8Mhz, boots in 30 minutes, and just running Task Manager by itself keeps the CPU pegged at 100%.

    That shouldn't have been hard to get more memory now than drive space then. :) My 486/33 came with a 20Mb hard drive. I upgraded it to 40Mb a little while later and I was the coolest kid on the block. :) I'm not sure you could find memory for a new machine. Well, in looking, you can get a 16Mb DDR2 SODIMM, but why would you want to? :)

    My home machine is 3.2Ghz Phenom II X4 with 6Gb RAM and 2Tb storage. Things have come a long way. :) I remember building out my first dual processor machine at one job, and that cost us a fortune. Oh my gosh, what would we possibly do with the mighty power of a dual Pentium Pro 200. :) That was just after I left another employer, and we were discussing the possibility of building a 1TB array with something like 140 9Gb drives (the biggest we could get our hands on at the time). They actually had a business purpose for it (hosting company), but it remained theoretical since it was pretty damned near impossible. What? 3 4 channel SCSI cards, and drives chained across multiple racks just to accomplish it?

    It was back in those days when it became obvious that we could spend huge money on huge hardware, or split up our services logically and stay with commodity equipment, and be able to stay with bleeding edge equipment with our important things and roll upgrades through the datacenters without impacting the customers.

    That was a fun trip down memory lane. :) I wouldn't want the 40Mb drive nor 486 for anything more than a doorstop though. Well, I do have some sitting in the garage in the "I should throw this away" pile. :)

SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.

The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.

The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.

The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.

The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).

Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.

Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App

SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.

The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.

The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.

The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.

The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).

Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.

Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App

AMD offer energy-efficient chips:

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launched two new single-core desktop chips that use less power than the preceding models, and a dual-core processor for high quality graphics and video on Microsoft's Windows Vista.

The Athlon 64 3500+ and 3800+ are based on 65nm process technology and run on 45 watts power. The previous version all consumed up as mush as 89 watts. These single core chips are made for small form-factor system designs.

"We expect that our commercial and consumer customers, as well as end-users, will be pleased with both the low noise and small form-factor designs possible using this latest generation of energy-efficient desktop processors," Bob Brewer, corporate VP of AMD's desktop division, said in a statement.

AMD also launched Athlon 64 X2 6000+ dual processor powering high-quality graphic, video and security on Window Vista.

These new chips are available in the market. The computer makers using the new processors include Dell Computer's subsidiary, Alienware, Fujitsu Siemens Computer, Systemax and Voodoo PC. The Athlon 64 3500+, 3800+ that costs $88 and $93 respectively. The Athlon 64 X2 cost $464.
Intel unveils super-chip technology
Intel recently publicized a diminutive new microprocessor that it could deliver "supercomputer-like" performance to home computers and handheld devices.

Intel said that this extraordinary programmable processor is not much larger than fingernail and use less power than typical home electronic devices and can perform more than a trillion calculations per second i.e. a "teraflop." Such 'tera-scale computing' could help in artificial intelligence, real time speech recognition, more realistic video games, instant online film viewing and other things related to science fiction, said Intel.

"Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward," said Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner.

"It points the way to the near future when teraflops-capable designs will be commonplace and reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office."

The first computer to run a teraflop speed was an Intel built machine at Sandia National Laboratories in 1996. The ASCI Red supercomputer is said to take up more than 2,000 sqft. (185 square meters) and used up to 500 kilowatts of electricity.

The California based Intel's '80-core'research chip at Santa Clara achieves teraflop performance using just 62 watts.

http://www.memory4less.com/cpus/m4l_turion64.asp

My old Thinkpad X-series is on its way out, but I'm going to get a new laptop before I go off to college next year. I love the idea of the Eee PC but I don' think I would spend another $250-400 buying an Eee PC if I'm just going to buy a new laptop next summer. How hard would it be to build my own?

I'm thinking one of these:
http://www.memory4less.com/m4l_itemdetail.asp?rid=fd_01&itemid=27208117

Combined with Xubuntu or some similar lightweight operating system in my current Thinkpad X24, and I would have a relatively quick machine that uses little power and weighs less than 3lb (actually, it already weighs something like 2.8lb). In other words, the advantages of an Eee PC without the full investment.

I'm willing to tolerate only 4gb of storage space. My only concern is if it'll work: I've heard things about the volatility of flash storage and how if power goes out, the data is all lost. Given that it's a laptop (and one that's been having battery issues recently), I wouldn't want to risk that, assuming it's true.

Any suggestions? I'd really like to give this a shot if it were possible. It would be a simple project with useful results.

http://memory4less.com/memory/m4l_ddr.asp

Looks the same to me. Within a dollar. High performance DDR (above PC3200) costs more than DDR2, actually.

That's great AMD is making slightly more efficient systems soon. This is likely because DDR2 uses less power (1.8V instead 2.4V). But AMD is so far behind, they won't come near catching up until they get to 65nm.

It bugs me to see so many people in denial about Intel vs. AMD right now. When people moved to AMD, I thought it was because they were doing the smart thing, and paying attention to relative performance and excellence. But if that was the case, I those same people wouldn't be making excuses for AMD right now.

Intel is beating them at the moment in all but the highest performance systems. And when Core 2 Duo (awful name) comes out, Intel will have that too.

I currently own an Athlon X2 4200+ and I love it. But I'm not a fanboy, I know AMD is in 2nd place right now.

Please AMD, keep the pressure on, pass up Intel again.

When these two companies compete, we all win.

Here's another bonus link of a Core Duo beating out an Opteron 175 (AMD dual) clock for clock.

http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2750

The only problem is that it only has 1MB of ram and the cartridges are extraordinarily expensive ($150 for a 13 year old 1MB ram cartridge, wtf?)

Is this $45 module what you are looking for? Here is a good deal on toner cartriges.

I just got a used Laserjet 4 for a song myself, and I am very happy with "old iron" :-)