I’m always looking for a cheap project to work on, and while digging through a closet at my Dad’s house the other day I came across an old PC. It was under a pile of my brother’s old stuff and hadn’t been touched in about 8 years. I pulled it out and asked if I could liberate it from its musty grave to see what could be done with it. After investigation I found that it was a computer my dad inherited from a business, when the business upgraded their machines. It was rocking Windows 98 and had collected enough dust to choke an infant.
When I got it home, and plugged it in, it worked. It booted up and got all the way into Windows. This was much more than I expected it to do. After surfing through multiple login pages and canceling the network password check I was able to do a status check of all the hardware and get some specs from it.
600 mHz Pentium 3
64 MB of SDRAM
8GB Hard Drive Space
Both video and audio were on-board and the USB ports were 1.0, so I’m not working with a completely defunct dinosaur. What I find very interesting is that the back of the computer had a key hole and a set of keys to lock and unlock the case. The lock was “supposed” to prevent me from getting to the case, but I didn’t learn this until I had already ripped off the case with the lock still locked. Oh well.
The motherboard and case setup is not your typical ATX standard, or at least not that I can tell. I will need to do a bit more research to find what I can fit on this Motherboard however, it does look like it has 3 distinct PCI slots. Those will come in handy.
I plan on tinkering with this PC in the coming months, and getting it upgraded enough to run Windows 2000, XP, or even 7. 2000 is my dad’s prefered OS if I plan on returning it, but I want to go big and try to squeeze 7 on it. I will be posting my progress regularly and hope to have it finished sometime next year. Wish me luck!!!
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