Don't you mean Little Green Packets of Death? Incompetent fools!

The fact that Google achieves a 66.66% success rate in acquisitions is amazing. Most M&A's have a success rate of 17%.

According to a quote from the Wharton School of Business:

"Various studies have shown that mergers have failure rates of more than 50 percent. One recent study found that 83 percent of all mergers fail to create value and half actually destroy value. This is an abysmal record. What is particularly amazing is that in polling the boards of the companies involved in those same mergers, over 80 percent of the board members thought their acquisitions had created value.

— Robert W. Holthausen, The Nomura Securities Company Professor, Professor of Accounting and Finance and Management

http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/open-enrollment/finance-programs/mergers-acquisitions-program.cfm

I'm not certain that there would be a significant performance increase from such a low-end processor. The VIA C7-D 1.8 only scores 333 on Passmark, which puts it in the range of an early-model Pentium 4 or Athlon XP from circa 2002.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=VIA+C7-D+1800MHz

It's also a 32-bit processor, so you're going to be capped at 3GB of RAM.

As an alternative, you can easily find used 4-5 year old Core2 Duo systems for $100-$200. They're 64-bit and will score 1300 or higher on Passmark.

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-755-Performance-Intregrated-Professional/dp/B004HPMH9Q/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1330885080&sr=1-4

I always attributed those to people playing around on VMs or their user agent strings.

But given the "640K RAM should be enough for anyone" mentalities I've seen around here, I'm not certain about that anymore.

Who said I was male?

The fact that you assumed that, and are still unflinchingly clinging to a 300mhz system from 1997 that is grinding your swap to death, indicates that you might need to get out more.

Very well then, we'll argue about more pocket change.

Discounting shipping, I've seen piles of 4GB drives selling at $4 at Walgreens on clearance, which with tax would be $5.

Either way, USB drives are dirt cheap and have been for years. I'm also a bit wary of the notion that malware will infest a USB drive formatted on ext3 because you were careless enough to use your $5 drive to transfer photos to a pharmacy, instead of reserving another stick for that purpose.

Windows Vista was a hog, but Windows 7 will run on any system that Ubuntu does, and runs well on the same systems, although you may have to disable Aero. The Windows 8 developer preview is actually faster and uses less memory that Windows 7, but it does require a "DirectX 9" graphics card (most anything 2002+), as the graphics are 100% 3D-accelerated.

Win7 also remarkably stable from what I've seen for the past 2 years or so. It's not subject to the junk XP was, like having to run ipconfig /flushdns (or rebooting) to fix network issues. It also uses ASLR and DEP by default for base security purposes.

Because of that, there's no reason to use XP in the Windows world ofr anything except for 1990s-era software that requires IE6 or does things like write to its own C:\Progra~1\ directory. Not to mention XP considers SATA to be exotic hardware, drivers haven't been written for it for years, its PnP driver capabilities are way outdated, etc.

But whatever you're using, it's your choice, and do enjoy. Just thought I'd inform you on this from the other side of things. :)

Then use Debian, use Puppy Linux, use BasicLinux, use whatever. It's your choice, whether you're running an 8-core AMD Bulldozer, a $250 netbook that leaves any 2003-era system in the dust, or something from the 1990s that belongs in a museum (or landfill).

I only wish you luck on getting any modern software, such as an ACID2-compliant browser like Iceweasel or Chromium, to run on a Pentium 1 with 48MB of RAM. Such things do not constitute Windows 98 era junkware. If you're reading this with lynx, more power to you!

Here you go, 4GB USB drive. A whopping $2.48 worth of pocket change.

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Flash-Drive-SDCZ36-004G-A11/dp/B001T9EYFI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320472244&sr=8-1

If you're that concerned, take it out of the package, put Ubuntu Linux on it, and then throw it away immediately like it's a message to Inspector Gadget.

Any system that has been made since circa 2001 (i.e. the past 10 years) has been able to boot from USB.

Ubuntu 11's system requirements are as such:

* 1 GHz CPU (x86 processor (Pentium 4 or better))
* 1 GiB RAM (system memory)
* 15 GB of hard-drive space

By Pentium 4 or better, that likely means it requires SSE2 instructions, which means Athlon 64 is the minimum on the AMD side. 1GB of RAM is hard to find or get on 2001-2002 P4's as well due to the use of RDRAM. So you're basically looking at 2003-era systems as a minimum to run Ubuntu.

But finding an 8 year old or better system as a hand-me-down, at a yard sale, or even by dumpster diving isn't difficult at all. Never really has been. Most systems like that will actually still work once the typical spyware-infested XP install is removed.

Considering a brand new 4GB USB flash drive is a whopping $2.47 on Amazon (or $5 at Walgreen's) it's not that big of a deal to get one of those either.

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Flash-Drive-SDCZ36-004G/dp/B001XURP7W/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1320470296&sr=1-3

Ubuntu made the right choice by dumping what is now an arbitrary 700MB limit. I'm sure plenty of people also "saw the light" of Linux on 1.44MB floppies in the late 90's as well, but it's almost 2012, and both eras are over now.

TLDR Ubuntu requires 2003-era systems to begin with. 4GB USB drives are $2.47 these days. No big deal.

Gah, typos, it's late.

* Did not mean to insinuate Core2's were 7 years old, just the range of CPUs would be 4-7 years old.
* "One can pull an image from a central server"