Talk about a lag in the thread... so to pick it up again...
Awhile ago Kenny, from ADWH back in the day, and I used to chat a bunch and email a bunch and the like. He was always trying software and OS's... he had it down, and every week or so I'd chat with him and he'd tell me he was running something different. He was the first one I knew that was totally into the disk imaging deal - he'd drop partitions, rebuild them, install an os, tweak it how he liked it, and then disk image the thing. He said he could flip back and forth from Win 95, 98, ME, NT4 within 20 to 30 minutes whenever he took a hankering to do so. Kinda like a Swiss Army Computer.
Over the last few years I have sorta gotten like that, although I am needing to go ahead and nail an imaging program already - I do mine from scratch every time. This week alone I have had Windows 98SE, NT4 Workstation, and now RedHat 9 again. I guess if I had a clarse or something that would requre me to kinda keep a stable footing I would probably stop messing around. Then again, in this house there are plenty of computers to be had... three desktops, one IBM compatible laptop and one Apple laptop, a Palm... Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Dreamcast, PS2, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo... if you can't find something digital in this house to do it is because you don't want to. Most of this stuff can go online, too.
I have also gotten quite a few beater systems in the past. Some are chronicled on my site... I had an old IBM 486 that had 16 megs of memory - man, I had a ball with that thing... and it was given to me for free. I managed to use it to get Windows for Workgroups 3.11 jacked into my network and on the net. Killer! I also managed to get Dragon Linux to run and hit the net from that thing... and I must stress that you can definately learn something from playing with an old beater. I guess I figure that I got it for free... if I blow the damn thing up I still will have the learning experience.
Want some fun? Next time you see an old 386 laptop at a yard sale, nail it. Snag an old Mac and play. Atari 2600's are still the crap. Nintendo, Colecovision, TRS 80's, Commodore 64's... man, that is some good, cheap digital fun!