I'm posting here with an 8½-year-old Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8160 I received for free from a coworker after she quickly found that it was inadequate for her new Comcast high-speed Internet setup. There's not much you can do with a 233 MHz Pentium, 32 MB of RAM, no LAN card, and an old, bloated upgrade install of Windows 98SE.

The motherboard will not support a faster CPU, but it will support 128 MB of RAM, so I ordered a 128 MB upgrade kit from Edge Tech Corp. I also replaced the CMOS battery. (This was the dustiest PC I have ever seen. The dust on the inside bottom of the case averaged about a half inch in depth with drifts well over an inch. All of the components were incrusted in layers of dust. I took it outside and emptied two cans of compressed air into it to remove it all.)

The 6 GB Quantum Fireball hard drive had no errors or bad sectors. I removed the ISA modem and sound cards and then sanitized the hard drive with a DoD 5220.22-M standard disk wiper. That was followed by a clean install of a full retail version of Windows 98SE -- no HP shovelware! No ghost of Win95! No sound, either. :-(

I installed an honest-to-Odin hardware dial-up PCI modem, replaced the 145 watt PSU with a compatible 250 watt unit and installed an Antec Cyclone Blower to give the case a much-needed ventilation boost.

I have pretty much settled on the free Agnitum Outpost Firewall v. 1.0.1817 and AVG Free Edition anti-virus (installed without the boot scan). I didn't like Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic's updater and I think it was conflicting too much with Outpost.

The PC is slooooow, but it is remarkably stable. I will eventually find a good home for it.