How Do I Provide a Workstation To Last 15 Years?

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 5, 2009 @08:27AM from the solid-state-prayer dept.

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?"

2 of 655 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Most 15-year old Sun workstations are still use by Athens101 · 2009-04-05 09:01 · Score: 0, Redundant

I second this idea of old Sun hardware. My old U5 precached six years ago is still going strong.
As another son of a veterinarian.... by Dahamma · 2009-04-05 11:45 · Score: 0, Redundant

Ok since I realized I spent 15 minutes trying to provide practical info to an anonymous submitter who will never read it, let's see if I can game the system by getting mine higher in the list - replying to a random post at the top to link to a sadly lost post at the bottom ;) Why bother? No idea, I guess I just felt like as a tech geek who has talked to his vet father about the SAME issues, I could provide something other than snark and cynicism to the / community for once...
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1188605&cid=27468991