Machine Revival - Part I

Yesterday, I went out with my wife and bought a computer table. I had been planning to revive an old Dell Dimension XPS T500 I had laying around and repurposing it to be an all-around computer for the kids. My son has simple needs. He has great fun playing the games included in Child's Play and Gcompris. Well the wife and I ended up buying a cheap computer table from Saver's Mall in Balibago.

After I got home, I immediately started working on the machine. I installed an 80GB Maxtor IDE drive I bought used a few months back. I also removed a non-working network card, and stuck a more recent PCI LAN Card i had lying around in one of my desk drawers. I also installed a PCI USB card.  The  Dimension XPS T500 had slow USB 1.1 and the card would at least bring it up to USB 2.0 speeds. I then closed up the side panel and expected the thing to boot. But it didn't! Beeps ensued and the Diagnostic LED's on the machine's back lit up with a pattern. So I went to find an online manual, praying one was still online at all. This machine has a date stamp of November 1999 after all. 

As luck would have it I found one (if your interested, it's here: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dkub/) . Following the clues as to what was going wrong, I reseated the video card and tried booting it. It booted up but the color on the display was yellowish. I reseated it again and powered it up once more. It beeped with a memory error. I unplugged the DIMMs, moved 'em to other slots and gave it a try. It POSTed! But then it was showing a PCI error. I forgot I left a PCI dial-up modem installed and decided to chuck it. The thing booted fine afterwards.

After I got it working I tried Fedora 12 Games, but it was just too slow to be usable. I was just hoping, but I knew the machine was too slow to use Fedora 12 Games. Anyway, I went off and tried another live distro, Linux Mint 8. This time it booted a lot more faster than Fedora, but it was still quite a good 8-10 minutes before I saw the desktop. I could just imagine my son jumping in anticipation only to get tired before the machine had fully booted. He's a little hyper over waiting time and jumps excitedly at times. While that was happening, I was waiting for my DreamLinux 3.5 download to finish. I've used DreamLinux 3.1 before on this same machine and it worked okay. And so I went with the reliable option and went ahead and installed  DreamLinux 3.5. After rebooting though, the machine wouldn't boot into it. It looked like the drive was having problems. So I tried disconnecting it and checking if the cables and connectors were okay, then booted it up again to try and install DreamLinux 3.5 again. Then I noticed the drive size was only 74.++ GB when it should be a little over 76 GB. Something wasn't right about the capacity. While thinking about it I decided to think it over. 

So today, after I got home and after thinking about it the whole day while at work, I gave the drive a go with DBAN. It's still running, actually. I don't expect it to finish any time soon. Maybe tomorrow morning. So I'll post an update if i get this to work. It would be a waste if I didn't get to play Tux Racer on this old machine now, would it?

Making The Most Out of My Aging PC

It's been a while since I last blogged. I haven't been getting enough time to do so. Mostly I update Twitter, but that's because I can easily access it through SMS. It's really trivial to just jot down an update, especially so when your limited to 140 characters.

Anyway, I was looking forward to an upgrade but I had to use the money for car repairs. So I just decided to extend the functionality of my current PC, until I save up what I need. I have an old XPS T500, just to give you an idea what I meant when I said "aging PC".

Since most of the things I do need updated hardware, I prudently bought what could improve its functionality, considering this is a 10-year old machine. Here's my very short list:

• LAN Card - D-Link 10/100 Fast Ethernet Card, Php 300
  
• PCI USB card - CDR-King 4-port (+1) USB 2.1 expansion card, Php 200
• USB Card Reader - CDR-King Classic Multi-format card reader, Php 120
• PCI SATA Controller - CDR-King 2-port (+1) SATA controller card, Php 380
• SATA Hard Drive - Seagate 7200.9 Drive, Php 1,000 (used)
  

Let's get into what I needed and why the above hardware. The LAN card on this 'Kublai' machine died around 2 weeks ago. No amount of coaxing could resurrect it. Hence the need for a LAN card. I settled on the D-Link as I have been using their products for years and I have had a great experience overall.

The USB ports on this machine hail back to the early days. It only has two USB 1.0 ports. Painfully slow, I knew I needed a boost eventually, I just had to find good enough reason. Enter the great season of Christmas and I got a hand-me-down iPod Video (Thank you, Auntie!!!). So now, I felt the pangs of having a slow USB connection hampering my transfer speeds. I got the PCI USB card primarily to speed up syncing the iPod. Second benefit is I could connect more devices on the same hi-speed interface now. I solved the dilemma of having to remove my USB Bluetooth Dongle when I need to connect another device. It was kind of odd though that the PCI card had 4 ports at the back and 1 additional port located on the side of the card. I found a use for the internal port. I connected the Bluetooth dongle and it's now inside the case :-) I also bought a recently-made card reader so I could transfer files to my wife's phone (the mini-card uses an MS Pro Duo adapter). It's always connected to the machine now.

As for the PCI SATA controlller card, I needed to buy a hard drive for extra storage. IDE HDD's are now becoming rare. Most HDD's are now SATA. Add to that the fact that my machine will choke on anything bigger that 120 GB's. The PCI Card allows me to use a bigger SATA Drive. The catch is that it would be difficult to install XP on it since it I would need to slipstream the SATA/RAID drivers into the installer before XP detects it. That doesn't matter to me right now. I have a working 80GB IDE HDD where I have the OS installed. What matters is the ability to use SATA to allow me the flexibility to use bigger drives and use current hardware on my aging machine. Heck the card even has an external port for connecting SATA devices. This card is what we call "sulit" in Filipino. My next buy would probably be a SATA DVD Writer ;-) How's that for an old machine?

I did buy a few other things from CDR-King, mostly for the iPod. But that's another blog post :-)