Quote from: OutOfMemory on Today at 07:27:40 PM

Quote from: Richy_T on Today at 03:07:55 PM

Quote from: OutOfMemory on Today at 11:45:08 AM

Interesting. It was also my first SSD based netbook, while i did experiment with Linux based VDR (DVB-S) before, in which i decided to install 4GB SSD as a system drive for fast boot, 2007, AFAIR. My eeePC was a later edition, including 3G sim slot and most components were covered by a plastic sheet inside, for dust protection. It was the perfect tool for hacking on the road and wardriving in urban areas. For now i will move to 12" mediatek netbook, some leftover from my mother, but i will have to install an SSD first, beacuse booting this thing to working state takes at least five minutes.
One thing to add: The eeePC battery held up quite well over all those years.

The netbooks were nice. It's a shame Microsoft decided to embrace, extend, extinguish. Now we have Chromebooks, I guess. I still have an eeepc with Ubuntu myself which is still useful on occasion.

I saw this Sony Vaio 10" netbook with debian on it on a IT security conference in Maastricht in 2002 and instantly fell in love with it. The eeePC was just a continuation of my love for tiny notebooks, and it had 3G, otherwise i would have chosen the VAIO (can't remember the model name, maybe it was X10?)

Quote from: JimboToronto on Today at 04:34:04 PM

At least you were aware back then about what a performance bottleneck storage was. It seemed as if CPU speed was the only thing a lot of people cared about. I remember a friend being annoyed that my old Socket7 AMD K6-2 system was visibly faster than his brand spanking new Pentium3 system. I pointed out that I had 4 times as much RAM and a faster HDD.

Indeed. I remember reading about SSD technology in a tech magazine. The main advantage (besides speed) that i saw was replacing temperatur sensitive disk drives. High spinning drives got hot and were noisy, but in Laptops you could not bring them inside from the cold in winter without letting the HDD warm up for at least 30 minutes or you risked to kill them because of condensation problems. When i was working for a support team, i got many of them for repair because the users kept them in the car's trunk overnight, bringing them into the office next day and litterally booting them to death.
This problem was gone with SSD technology.

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I was always fascinated by the idea of booting from solid-state storage but flash memory capacities were too small then. In 2005 Gigabyte brought out iRAM which put 4 DIMMs on a PCI card to allow fast booting but it was vulnerable to power outages. I backed off until decently sized SLC non-volatile SSDs became available a year or two later. My big breakthrough came when I replaced my RAID-0 array of 4 10000RPM WD Raptors with 4 OCZ Vertex SSDs in RAID-0. I was disappointed to find it was bottlenecked by my motherboard's southbridge. I had to get a PCIe RAID card to get full performance. From there I graduated to my first OCZ Revodrive.

Those were the days.

Story of a true storage gourmet Grin

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You mention wardriving. Many people didn't bother to protect their wifi back then so wardriving was a thing. I remember warning people about protecting their wifi after an incident in Toronto's west end. The cops stopped a car at 5:00am driving the wrong way on a residential street. They found the driver with his pants at his ankles masturbating as he downloaded kiddie porn onto his laptop using other people's wifi networks. Good thing the cops got the guy. Imagine some sucker sleeping innocently at home not knowing he was getting put on the kiddie porn list.

Struck by Karma. We did the wardriving to find entry nodes for carrying out mass-website-defacing, which is also not quite nice, but way nicer than downloading ch1ld-pr0n.
It was about competition, not about doing harm to website owners (mostly companies). There was a site on the internet, where every defaced index page was mirrored after you reported it, as well as toplists of the most successful groups, where we held first place for some time, until one of our members in Brazil got busted after hacking (the wrong) FTP servers. It then fell all apart quickly and the rest of us got real jobs.

I remember there was a time (maybe early '00s) when you could crack Wi-Fi passwords fairly easily, esp. those of the WEP variety. I did it a few times, mainly to speed up downloading time (run a couple of VMs, each with a Wi-Fi stick connected to a neighbor's cracked Wi-Fi). 3 connections simultaneously downloading stuff. Used Kali Linux to do the cracking. Fun times. Now it's not so easy, probably much harder than I can hope I'm capable of. For my own router, I use a self-chosen, strong password and have all my Wi-Fi devices on the router's MAC-address white list, although I have a feeling all these can easily be defeated by a determined attacker, considering the usually poor f/w programming in those provider-supplied routers.