A PC, that is.
Somebody gave me a c. 2000 HP Pavilion the other day, knowing full well that I wouldn't rest until it was running again.
It's a 667 MHz Intel Celeron (NOT my favorite CPU) with 256 MB of memory, a 40 gig hard-disk, and built-in everything. I'd worked on bunches of this identical machine before, and frankly, they were throw-aways six months after they were bought back then.
Besides the fact it only had one free PCI slot, it only has a 100 Watt power supply, for Pete's sake!
Aint no bad boy video card ever goin' in there!
I farted around for a few hours formatting the drive, and reinstalling Windows98. WELL......turns out there's some pretty severe limitations on what will run on Win98. The very latest version of Internet Exploiter is 6.something with Service Pack 1, the latest version of Java is 5.1, the latest version of Firefox is 2.0, and so on, and so on.
I finally threw in the towel and decided to put Linux on it, and be done with it. I tried several of the 'lightweight' distributions, but they all ran really sloooow. Even Win98 ran like greased lightning compared to some of them.
I decided to try "Puppy Linux", as I'd heard good things about it, and although it took me longer than it normally would to get a PC running Linux, now that it's finished, it runs very well.
This PC, along with a new keyboard, mouse, and refurbed monitor, will go to the minister that married my wife and I, and she'll turn it over to somebody in her church that can't afford a "new" PC.
And there's one less hunk of electronics off the street, and put back to good use.
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What I've Been Up To....
Started this post on Monday, then came down with a head cold, which is now progressing South. Feeling better, but still a bit woozy...... To...
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I know it was a lot of headache, but GOOD JOB!
ReplyDeleteIt really wasn't that bad. Fixing/building/upgrading PC's was what I was doing to keep busy during the 17 months I was laid off, and since I've been tinkering with them since the late 1980's, I've gotten pretty good at it.
ReplyDeleteThe last PC I built to specifically run Windows98 was about a year or so ago. I wanted to play a certain game, and it only runs on Windows95/98. So I gathered up all the fixins' for what would have been a $2000 PC 'back in the day' (cost me about $300!), and put Win98 on it. I saved all the old software I had to dig up for it, but can't seem to find the disks I burned, and I didn't want to set that particular PC up just to copy the programs from it. I suppose I should ensure that I have all that old software stored on our network server, and that way it'll be more readily available the next time I need it. "Vintage PC's" are starting to get popular with people who enjoy playing some of the older games that won't run on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 due to the way they were coded. Since I have boxes and boxes of good used parts (and some new-in-box stuff), I might consider opening up "Dr. Jim's Vintage PC's Shoppe" for grins and giggles.
Heck, I still have my Commodore 64 and 128 computers, disk drives, monitors and printers, and they run perfectly!