How Do I Provide a Workstation To Last 15 Years?
An anonymous reader writes "My father is a veterinarian with a small private practice. He runs all his patient/client/financial administration on two simple workstations, linked with a network cable. The administration application is a simple DOS application backed by a database. Now the current systems, a Pentium 66mhz and a 486, both with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of hard drive space, are getting a bit long in the tooth. The 500MB harddrives are filling up, the installed software (Windows 95) is getting a bit flakey at times. My father has asked me to think about replacing the current setup. I do know a lot about computers, but my father would really like the new setup to last 10-15 years, just like the current one has. I just dont know where to begin thinking about that kind of systems lifetime. Do I buy, or build myself? How many spare parts should I keep in reserve? What will fail first, and how many years down the line will that happen?"
Yes, you can, through dropbox.
Stop spamming your referrals, asshat.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Oh well, sorry. I did it with good intentions, but it's spam, I guess. I was thinking: provided someone actually joins dropbox, they would be actually getting more space. Oh well, I guess I deserve the troll mod; but if anyone joins it and uses it, you know what? Then I just might have done someone a favor. This is not zero-sum. And I do believe that the best solution here is virtualization with a dropbox synch... so despite the spam, for which I apologize, that's really my opinion.