Just a comment or 2.....
> 
> Yes, that can be done, certainly - but in terms of hydro usage and its 
> cost (since nothing is really free!), you're talking about a huge 
> difference in cost after a year's 24/7 operation...  even 100W x 8760 
> hours = 876 kWh at even 8 cents per = $70.08 in hydro... more than 
> enough to pay for a standalone router, without all the worry of hard 
> drives, operating systems, booting it, configuring it, and maintaining 
> it, and in the summer, getting rid of the heat it generates.
> 
> Having no 486 here at present to hook up to my power consumption meter 
> (Kill-A-Watt, available from thinkgeek.com for about 3/8 what I paid for 
> it!), I can't tell you what the actual consumption of said beast might 
> be, but if the hard drive's as old as the CPU, I can tell you I don't 
> want to listen to that whine!
> 
> -Derek
> 
    If the point is cost then surely a standalone over time is cheaper but
I thought there was an availability problem of routers with modem
connectivity and furthermore that this was a temporary fix ie broadband
coming soon.

  Also, no hard drive is necessary, however I do have an old Classic
Pentium based router which employs an old Promise IDE accellerator card I
had lying about with no place to use it anymore so I did for a time use it
and a 6G drive (which was waaaay overkill, but again, lying about, idle)
which did not whine at all.  My calculations have it's average usage at 85
watts.  That dropped to 70 watts upon removal of the hard drive and use of
a Live CD based router OS.  Incidentally I used a video switch so that it
could share a monitor for booting up.  Once up Freesco has a web-based
config utility so the router is at idle basically all the time since
routing runs in ram and is not in the least cpu intensive.  I also like the
fact that the CD cannot be written to so any compromising disappears of any
sort upon reboot.  While it is possible to add lots of packages on the OS
the simpler it is the less anyone who actually manages to compromise it can
do, sort of like breaking into an empty
 room.  
Jimmy



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