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Steve Conner

Wed Dec 20 2006, 11:58AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Hi guys

I recently got a new PC, and that freed up the old one to be dismantled and messed about with. And then my workplace threw out a pile of computer bits too. So I did a lot of messing around and thought I would post my findings in case anyone else is interested.

Box #1: First I decided to see if I could make a usable XP machine with bits from the 1990s. I got a 600MHz PIII CPU in the Slot 1 cartridge, a couple of Intel BX motherboards and 256MB worth of PC100 memory. (scary to think that we're up to PC4200 or something now...) I didn't have a hard drive, so I bought a new 80GB one for $40. I also bought a USB2.0 card and a cheap $15 soundcard. Graphics wise I had a Radeon 9250 to try. I also used a cheap D-Link network card.

I stuck it all together with the Gigabyte 6BXC mobo (which needed flashing to recognise the hard drive) and tried installing XP. It installed without a hitch, but once it was done the graphics card driver refused to install

No amount of messing with IRQs and swapping cards around made any difference.

I tried an old GeForce2 PCI card and that worked fine, with enough acceleration to play movie clips full-screen. But it was bugging me that the better AGP card wouldn't work. I tried swapping the motherboard out for a Chaintech 6BTM, and then the Radeon worked but the USB2.0 wouldn't. But after swapping the cards between different slots a couple of times, they all started to work.

Notes: When using old hardware like this you need to make sure ACPI is turned ON in the BIOS setup. A lot of BIOSs had options to assign IRQs and suchlike, all that must be turned off, because XP wants to be able to assign them itself.

If you bought an OEM copy of XP, it locks itself to the hardware you install it on forever. But this is only done when you activate it online with Microsoft. Before you do that, it seems you can mess with the hardware all you like. The MAC address of your network card is one of the things that it keeps tabs on, so I included a cheap Cat5 network card from the start, even though I'm giving the box to my mum and dad who have Wi-Fi.

Verdict: Worked great! XP actually feels faster on this hardware than 98 did, and it's more than enough for stuff like e-mail, internet and word processing etc. In particular it boots up very fast. The lame animated see-thru menus don't seem to bog it down (I guess the graphics card accelerates them) but I turned them off anyway.

Box #2: A friend gave me an old Compaq 733MHz P3 whose hard disk had died. I decided to try to make it into a souped up reincarnation of my old PC which still had a lot of handy software on it that I, err, "Lost the install CDs" for

My old PC had a 4GB drive for boot and an 80GB for audio. I wanted to add a Linux dual boot, but there wasn't enough room on the tiny system drive, so this is what I did:

Bought a new 80GB drive and formatted it in the Compaq, booted from a Win98 recovery floppy. It needed its BIOS flashed to recognise the 80GB drive, and still didn't quite work: it thought it was formatting a 20GB disk but somehow it ended up with 80GB of free space anyway!

Hooked the old 4GB drive to my "good" computer with a USB-to-IDE dongle, and made a copy of the contents, then disconnected it, hooked up the fresh 80GB one, and dumped the contents back onto it.

Put the 80GB drive into the Compaq and marvelled as it actually booted into Win98 and recognised all the new hardware

Used my good computer to download an ISO image of the latest Ubuntu and burn it to a CD, then booted the Compaq from this and used the Ubuntu installer to resize partitions and suchlike. The installer crashed while resizing, but luckily the hard disk survived.

Result, one dual boot! (And thanks to Alex and the others on #hvcomm for helping me out with the Linux stuff.)

Verdict: Ubuntu seems to work great even on this old hardware. I could chat on Google Talk and even watch movies on YouTube after Alex and joshua showed me how to upgrade the Flash player. It only took a couple more mouse clicks to install the C compiler package, and after a bit of fiddling around I got it to compile and run the Hello World program.

Sometimes things take a while to load, and the graphics are a bit slow, but there may be an accelerated X server for my card (a Radeon All-In-Wonder that I got off ebay for another project) that would fix that. And it's a real nice looking OS.

The Win98 side runs and boots a lot faster. I think it's due to the new hard disk and controller being quicker. It has an 80 conductor hard drive cable, and the machine booted a lot faster with it plugged in the right way round.

Simon

Wed Dec 20 2006, 11:36PM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

I run Win2k on a 500MHz PII. That's not nearly so much work as XP, I'll admit. Good stuff!

All this talk of 700MHz PCs being dated, though. Earlier this year a 133MHz PC was my main tinkering machine...

Taking old computers to bits and making okay ones out of the parts is loads of fun (you can often find people desperate to get rid of their old Pentiums and you can learn a lot about stuff). I've lost count of how many old boards I have around.

Win98 is a good (MS) OS for old computers. Its main fault is that it can't handle USB drives. If you're a real geek and your computer is a part of your life, not just a tool, I recommend FreeBSD with the Blackbox window manager. It can be made to work very well on low resources.

Steve Conner wrote ...

after a bit of fiddling around I got it to compile and run the Hello World program.

Wow. :P

...

Thu Dec 21 2006, 12:02AM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

I can't say that I am currently running anything 'new' on 'old' hardware, but for years I was using a 300mhz Pentium MMX processor, with 64MB of ram, S3 trio virge w/4MB expansion pack, and a 8GB hard drive running XP as my computer. Back then I used it primarily for writing (office2k), the net, and playing mp3's. Since it could do all of that at once, I was happy

One time I opened it up to check for dust and whatnot, and I noticed that the processor heatsink had fallen off. So the processor was just running bare for months... And one time the power supply started to give me a buzzing sound folowed by some smoke

I do have a really old laptop, (well, not really old, it did have a lcd screen) that I managed to get win95 to run on (no cdrom to try win98 with, and it only had 2mb of ram if I remember correctly). I put in a pcmia->ethernet card and managed to get it to connect to the net, but it was so unbelievably slow. Like loading the google logo took seconds

I was thinking of trying to use it as a mp3 player, but it didn't have any type of sound output, so I would have had to find a serial->sound or paralel->sound card, which I decided against. I believe the specs were a 386 processor running at 8mhz, 2mb of ram, a 800mb hdd, and odd inverted trackball mouse in the keyboard. It might have been faster, but I think the rest of the specs are correct. I remember one time I took of the keyboard to check something, and I discovered a connector that looked suspiciously like a processor slot, with a single transistor wired in with a little 30awg silver/kynar wire... I was thinking of putting on some primitive linux distro, but decided that there was just no point.

Carbon_Rod

Thu Dec 21 2006, 03:30AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

Some video cards require manual installation from the network source. For ATI duplicate entries try the second on the list.

About activating Windows XP.
1.) All old corporate keys were toasted by Microsoft some time ago.
2.) The new keys use the updated Guanine Advantage to roll call your asset inventory.
3.) IE 7 breaks stuff.
4.) SP1 and SP2 had a break for the telephone activation.
5.) The updates are going to require a legitimate validation.
6.) Windows 2000 was one of the better OSs they made.

Nothing like calling India to activate Windows XP.
You complain too much... just wait for a week after you install Vista. lol

Licenses are cheap, donâ€™t bother buying the retail disks over and over.

ragnar

Thu Dec 21 2006, 07:06AM

Registered Member #63 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425

Hey, I got Red Alert 1 to run on my 20MHz 386 with *gasp* 11MB of RAM (8MB plus a 3MB ISA expension card), and an 80MB drive. Squeee!

But nothing drives me nuttier than hardware conflicts with mix-and-match old PCs.

Steve Conner

Thu Dec 21 2006, 09:49AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

You can make flash drives work on 98, with the Maximus Decim USB Storage Class Driver

This has got to be my favourite 98 hack of all time.

Carbon_rod, the Genuine Advantage thing doesn't give away any worse information than the XP activation process does. FUD works both ways you know

The video card thing must have been a BIOS problem, I guess the old motherboard didn't initialize the AGP slot properly or something. The second mobo I tried was almost identical apart from the BIOS.

Simon, I agree FreeBSD is great for lower-powered hardware, such as toasters and microwave ovens. I heard it even runs on the cheap ones that don't have digital timers...

Avalanche

Thu Dec 21 2006, 12:23PM

Registered Member #103 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:16PM
Location: Derby, UK
Posts: 845

I've been known to try and get the most out of old hardware...

My first PC was an IBM 386, which ran windows 3.11 happily for years. That was actually a decent machine, but I decided to try and install windows95 on it one day (from floppies). It took just over 3 hours for the minimal install, and left me with about 10MB free on the hard disk, and it wouldn't boot. So I upgraded to a 486SX 33Mhz, and that ran win95 perfectly. I remember performing some serious upgrades on that machine, including an extra 8MB of RAM (which yes, made a huge difference) and a second-hand 1GB hard drive, which cost me about Â£45. That machine ran me right up until about the year 2000, and did everything I needed it to

(or at least until I discovered Napster, that was what prompted me to finally get rid of it, because it couldn't handle mp3 files)

Anyway I have win2k running quite happily on a PII-333Mhz, but it doesn't have to do much (just apache and stuff). I've had quite a play around with xubuntu and some old hardware, that seems to be a good way to get old PCs going again with a modern OS. I tend to install windows NT4 on old computers though, it's as fast as win95 and rock-solid stable. With careful choice of software, it feels faster than my Athlon2600 I'm typing this on!

Simon

Sat Dec 23 2006, 04:01AM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

Carbon_Rod wrote ...

6.) Windows 2000 was one of the better OSs they made.

Except for hardware. Getting hardware to work on Win2k isn't something you take for granted.

Steve: I'm very glad to be wrong! I'll give that driver a go.

My oldest PC is a 286. I've no hope of trying new software on that since the motherboard won't take any hard disks. (A computer repair shop was throwing it out and can I really be stuffed trying to fix it myself?) Besides, the 286 is, of course, 16 bit. I use it as a sacrificial PC for testing parallel/serial port circuits (using assembler coded boot sectors).

Edit: Avalanche: I've put Win2k onto a 333MHz PII before as well.

Carbon_Rod

Sat Dec 23 2006, 09:50PM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

The Win2000 Pro system hardware requires OEM driver support. A large vendor like HP will have most of the hardware drivers.

WinXP however complains if the driver is not signed by Microsoft. Can be a bit of a hassle sometimes if you have an old ATI mobile video card or a LinkSYS wireless card. Also the built-in wireless NIC drivers on new systems can have issues too.

FUD? If you read the updated EULA that pops up when you update a legitimate copy of windows (and the WGA) you will notice it also â€œupgradesâ€ your office installations etc.

Fear: Your laptop has the computrace agent preinstalled by vendors like Toshiba, Sony, or Acer.

Uncertainty: Once the asset tag is internally flagged it remains active even if uninstalled, hard drive is transferred (infects the new system too), or system is wiped.

Douubt: A dual boot laptop that is not Windows is practically impossible because the agent continuously corrupts boot loaders that rely on the MBR space.

Microsoft wins again.... =]
Cheers,

Steve Conner

Sun Dec 24 2006, 10:06AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

That's the whole point of Computrace. It's designed to stick around and be hard to remove, to prevent theft, so I'm not surprised it's so hard to wipe out. If you don't like it, don't buy (or steal) a laptop that has it.

I asked around all my friends and colleagues who have computers running XP. Like me, they said "Don't install" the WGA the first few times that it tried to, but eventually gave in to the badgering. And so far nothing bad has happened, though we certainly expected it to. On my own XP machine, I installed OpenOffice rather than a pirate copy of Office 97 or whatever, and so far, MS haven't got me with the "Your Office Suite Is Not Microsoft Advantage Assistant" :p I must admit that the whole WGA thing does leave me slightly uneasy, though, hence why I'm starting to play around with other OSs.

As for dual boots, I once had to sort out a mess caused by trying to dual boot Mandrake with Win2k Server. We ended up getting an engineer out from Dell, and we all stood around scratching our heads at it. I think the MBR had got corrupted. They seem to be a lot better nowadays, especially if you put your *nix OS on last and use its bootloader.

Driver signing in XP: It complains, but it still lets you install the driver anyway. For a while, we were shipping a product with a driver that wasn't digitally signed, and we included a page in the manual saying "Please ignore the 'This Driver Is Not Signed' dialog that appears in Step 3"

The bottom line is, I don't think Microsoft has "won" as much as they were winning back in the 90s. 2k and XP are both serious OSs (with real multi-users and everything, wow) but having tried a couple of the latest Linux distros, I'm really impressed. You can also have a kind of hybrid OS if you get XP, and replace IE with Firefox and Outlook Express with Thunderbird or Gmail. Firefox and Sun Java are almost like a platform-independent OS within an OS.

PS: I'm very impressed that people are still using PIIs and 486s, that's thrifty :-o

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