Hello awesome readers! Today I had a few articles planned, but I got delayed by a wonderful little project today, that being a computer from 2002 that I picked up for all of 10 dollars, and it works fine.
Well, it works fine from a machine standpoint. However, the machine, as it was, needed work. First off, it was on Windows XP. Blah! I grabbed it because it actually had a Windows 2000 COA on it, so I knew it could support the operating system. I’ve been wanting an actual, physical Windows 2000 system for years – It’s my favorite operating system by far, as far as the classic, obsolete ones go, and I have fond memories of it. Naturally, having a machine to use would be as fun as having an old game console to play on. At least, to someone like me.
So, the quest was to get the machine running Windows 2000. First things first, nuke XP. That part is easy. In messing around, I learned the machine has a 40 gig hard disk, 256mb of SDRAM (a much older type, predating the modern DDR type ram), a 1.7ghtz Pentium 4 (a pretty damn nice processor, honestly) and a 16meg ATI Rage 128 graphics card: an absolute classic!
After an annoying time setting up a linux distro that would, I presumed, work in the machine and allow me to check detailed stats on the hard disk, I was disappointed to find it just not working right. At that stage though, I had played around enough in XP to learn the machine at least was stable, and so I went ahead with the Windows 2000 install.
The joy of driver issues.
Now, installing an older operating system, in this case from 1999, onto a more modern machine (this one dating back to 2002) is not a fun time – the hardware, of course, needs proper software to run correctly, and this can sometimes be an absolute pain.
Thankfully, this machine, an old Dell Optiplex GX240, is a very common business machine, and drivers are archived all over the web. Finding the correct ones is an absolute pain, though, but that’s fine – it just takes time to sort between the various ones and find the correct set.
Xadara on a Windows 200 machine running Firefox 12.0. Works a treat!
A few hours later, I had it. Working graphics, sound, and installs of what software would work on the machine: Windows 2000 hasn’t been supported by Microsoft in 6 years, and most software developers have abandoned it. However, it’s still useful for games from back in that era, like MechCommander or Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and still has support under OpenOffice, my favorite productivity software, so I can, for the heck of it, use this machine to type pretty much whatever I want. If I really wanted to, I would update Xadara on it, but considering security issues with older unsupported operating systems, I doubt I will be doing such.
Tomorrow, more of the usual posts. Today, though, this machine took up my time. That, and the hours of thrifting that included me finding it, among a few other useful things.