I took sometime yesterday to work on our oldest computer, a P-166 which now functions mainly as a print server–nothing fancy, just a Canon Bubblejet. It runs Windows 98 and had way too much starting up at boot. I cleaned out a lot of stuff and it now runs faster and hopefully will be less likely to have memory problems, as well as being more reliable for printing. I needed that for the tax work I was doing earlier today.

I also finally set up Samba on my main Linux machine so I could connect to that printer. This was really long overdue. My HP inkjet printer died a couple years ago and all it had was an ancient (c. 1985) Epson FX-185 dot matrix printer, from our first computer system. I am going to keep the Epson–there is nothing wrong with it and I can still buy the ribbons it uses. It is fine for plain ascii, so I can freely use it for rough drafts and listings. The Windows machines can also connect to it now, so it can be a backup in case the Canon fails.

Somewhere I heard these old dot matrix printers being described as the computer equivalent of a brick outhouse. They are rather obtrusive and unpleasant to be close to when in use. However, they are also reliable and almost indestructible..