Charles Brabham wrote:

If you are a Packet BBS SYSOP on HF or are thinking about becoming one, do
yourself a favor and check this out. - You'll be very glad you did. Obsolete
Win98 machines work fine for this application, and in many places can be had
for much less than the price of a new HF-capable TNC.

I've found that disgustingly old notebooks are amazingly useful for things like
this. I had an old 100MHz Pentium notebook running PSK31 for the longest time;
it worked fine and wasn't useful for much else.

When you consider that most TNCs have a 4MHz Z-80 inside, it's not that
hard to imagine a 100 or 200MHz Pentium can do DSP + CPU duty...

Notebooks are especially appealing since they're entirely self-contained
and usually still have a working battery to tide you over short commercial
power failures. Ironically, a 5-year old notebook is chopped-liver to
pretty everyone but us.

Cheers!
Dana K6JQ

P.S. How many of y'all have AMD64-based notebooks? ;-)