Scavenged from the back alleys of Dell.com
By way of the elderly I recently came into possession of a 2003 vintage Dell Dimension 2400. This baby comes complete with Intel Pentium 4 at 2.2GHz, with a whopping 256MB of RAM, and a 40GB Hard drive. Lucky me, it has 6 USB 2.0 ports; such speed is shocking for a Dell. Complete with fingerprinted CRT monitor, ball mouse, and a pleasant keyboard, however no speakers.
So how can this 6 year old PC be of use to me? Find out after the jump.
Operating system? Windows XP Home. Fail. The current install is almost inoperable. It crawls with 256MB RAM, and its not just the RAM. I have an IOpener Netpliance with 64mb RAM that runs XP better- on a 100MHz VIA processor to boot! In order to get the previous owners’ data off of this beast and to their excuse for a “new” computer, I had to try several times with an external DVD burner and a secondary admin account.
I know what you are thinking: Boot a live cd and use that to transfer everything off over the network. Well guess what? A Ubuntu live CD won’t even boot on 256MB RAM, it just hangs at the mouse pointer. Next stop: Windows Server 2003 or even Ubuntu Server Edition. It can join the ranks of my failed Exchange servers, failed web servers, and ignored Linux boxen. Unfortunately, I could not load Windows 7 for some reconnaissance, because not only would it not recognize the additional hard drive I added, but it also only comes equipped with a CD-ROM. No DVDs here!
Task List:
- Add DVD-ROM drive.
- Upgrade measly 40GB hard drive by way of adding a second one.
- Achieve Windows XP Pro/Windows Server 2003 dual boot.
Since I have written the above, I have made some advancements. I have successfully installed Windows Server 2003. That lasted about 2 days, then I replaced it with XP SP3 with the “Royale” theme, AKA media center edition theme. Looks much better. Yesterday, I downloaded Windows 7 Release Candidate from Microsoft, and I plan to install via DVD soon.
UPDATE:
Windows 7 FAILED on this hardware. The graphics card was the only issue, at 640×480 resolution. XP Pro eventually went on this box, and the ram was upgraded to 512mb. It ran like a champ, then got boring. SO, now it is my TrixBox server, happily providing extremely low-cost, and even free, VOIP telephone service. Works great!
That concludes my article,
Scott