I cleared the CMOS on the server, flashed the BIOS, repartitioned and formatted the hard drive. I took out the sound, video, and IDE controller cards we’d added, as well as the really huge hard drive (which requires the added controller card to work). I disabled the integrated NIC, as it seems to become unreliable, but the replacement is the only “extra” thing in the case at the moment. Now I’m doing an absolutely clean install of Linux on that machine.
We have one machine almost ready to go into Katie’s room—she was VERY excited when she left to go road-tripping with curiousmay9 and M. We haven’t allowed the kids to have PCs in their rooms in the past, but she has proven herself trustworthy and she is getting to where she uses one more and more for academics.
I have a different PC 🙂 I’m running Win2k on it, and I like it. Sam and Katie’s PCs are running WinME since they play games at times. Katie loves The Sims, and apparently, it doesn’t get along well with Win2k.
Next is the machine that I was using, the one Sam’s ex-employer had tossed as trash. I haven’t given up on it yet. It’s a Data General and I guess they’ve gone out of business, or the PC business at least, as I’ve never been able to find any documentation on that motherboard (even at motherboards.org). I’m hoping I can get it back up and reasonably stable. It seems that it was manufactured for DG by Acer, but I can’t find anything on Acer’s sites, either. Grrr.
For using a bunch of salvaged hardware, we’re doing pretty damned well. The server could stand to have more RAM, though. I wonder if there’s a way to trade in DIMMs to get a price break on larger ones?
