SillyDog701

[Jeffredo]

I received a discarded PC from work a few weeks ago. It's a Dell V350 with a PII 350! Anyway, I love trying to resuscitate old computers so here are the additions I made to it:

Powerleap Celeron 1.1 upgrade
384 MB Crucial PC100 RAM
30 GB Maxtor 7200 HD
Nvidia MX420 PCI video card
Windows XP Home

It's now a pretty viable backup to my new PC. Spent way too much on an old PC, but it's my hobby and I had fun doing it!

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[Don_HH2K]

I recently updated some of my computers. My 1997 Custom machine was recently upgraded to run Win2k and was overclocked another 13MHz to run it. I also put VMWare on my Pavilion laptop and am running Longhorn 4051 on it. I am also planning on running Windows 2000 Server on the network server in addition to Mandrake Linux 8.2.

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[DJGM]

I have also been given an almost totally obsolete PC recently. It contains a Pentium CPU that runs
at 133Mhz. There's just 48MB of RAM (EDO type) and a rather low HDD capacity of only 1.6GB.

No floppy drives seem to work on it at all, and there's no option in the BIOS to let the system
boot from the very slow (8x) CD ROM drive. During boot up, there's a message that says:

Floppy drive fail (40)

The boot drive options available in the BIOS are only A and C. This system won't even
fully boot up from the HDD, as it presents this message while trying to start the OS:

NTLDR not found

It looks as though there's been a failed attempt to install Windows NT on the system.
Apparently, the system has previously had a Hebrew version of Windows 95 installed.

Any ideas as to what I can do next to get the system working with a suitable OS?
I'm currently considering setting up the system for use has a hardware firewall.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

[Mandrake]

DJGM: I'd take a look at the motherboard.. what model is it? Who makes it? you may be able to flash the BIOS to make it work with the CD-Rom drive. I'd also try a different IDE cable for the floppy drive.

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[Edward]

Not too long ago, I had to re-flash the BIOS in my Pentium system (try doing THAT with Linux!) because the clock was doing some crazy things, and a battery replacement would not fix it.

Upon flashing the BIOS (had to create a Windows boot disk to do that, which XP created ("ver" indicated it was Windows ME), with the same revision as currently running, it took care of the problem. I do not know what happened, but I wish DJGM good luck in finding an updated BIOS for that system.

Because this BIOS has not been updated since 1998, it will only recognize up to a 30 Gb hard drive.

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[Don_HH2K]

You think 30GB is bad? This old computer freezes so often that I have tried to avoid a BIOS flash for awhile, and the largest hard drive that it can support is 5.5GB.

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[swirven]

Desktop
Gateway
1 Ghz Pentium lll
20 Gig HD
512 ram
32mb Nvidia
CDRW
15" LCD
Windows XP


Laptop (my toy for tinkering)
Compaq
1.1 Ghz AMD Duron
20 Gig HD
368 ram
DVD Rom
Dual boot Fedora Core2/Windows XP

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[Antony]

Shark Daddy's inquiry on building a new computer has been split to this thread, as there's enough posts to start a new topic.

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[Wellander]

Hi,
I know that this is slighly off topic but I am using a Television as a Computer Monitor.

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[Antony]

Hi,
I know that this is slighly off topic but I am using a Television as a Computer Monitor.

Can you take a picture of your connection? (TV and PC with a digital camera?)

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[Wellander]

Hi,
I know that this is slighly off topic but I am using a Television as a Computer Monitor.

Can you take a picture of your connection? (TV and PC with a digital camera?)

Hi,
I have a video card that has a S video out to do that with.
High end video card.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 98)

[Mandrake]

Several additions to my main PC:

I added a second 80GB hard disk, as I was running out of room on my first 80Gb HD.

Added a Netgear 802.11g 54mbps wireless network card, works with the router

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

[Don_HH2K]

Upgraded my server box recently:

Still dual-booting on a 4.2GB system drive and a 20GB storage drive.

I'm now running NT Server 4 instead of Win98, much more crash-proof. Didn't use USB anyway, and Webview was pointless.

I also upgraded Mandrake Linux 8.2 (workstation) to Linux 9.2 server. Don't ask me why I didn't upgrade to version 10, even I don't know.

And, it turns out that running a 100MHz PC at 133MHz fried both my modem and two sticks of RAM. So now I'm back down to 120MHz and 64MB of RAM on Win98 instead of Win2k... Back to stability issues...

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[Antony]

Several additions to my main PC:
[...]
Added a Netgear 802.11g 54mbps wireless network card, works with the router

Nice!

So what is the router you use? the one combined with your ADSL modem?

If you haven't got a wireless router, AirPort Extreme Base Station or AirPort Express would be a nice one.

As I showed in [sdp=32768]that post[/sdp], I added AirPort Extreme card (802.11g) to my desktop Mac.

I can wirelessly "ad-hoc" two Macs without the Base Station, it is reasonable fast. but guess what? A bit slower than if I connected via ethernet cable.

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[Antony]

I updated my laptop with 1GB memory module,

I know my Mac is not fast... but everything is now even faster!

Spec:
PowerBook 1.33GHz, 12" (Rev C),
RAM: 1.25 GB (maximum),
80GB HDD,
Combo,
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 (64MB DDR),
FireWire 400,
Airport Extreme,
Bluetooth.

I love my PowerBook!

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