Monday, December 8, 2008

Building really old computer

It's been a few days since I got my hands dirty, so I'm looking for some new projects.

I got my hands on an old sis 5598 motherboard that's a socket 7 and uses edo ram! It has 128 megs installed on board, and has an es1869f (ess audiodrive) sound chip built in.

I'm pumped at the thought of putting this back to work as a torrent slave. Now I just have to get a cheap computer case, as I already have a 200 watt atx power supply sitting here doing nothing. I'm going to pop in an old pci voodoo 3 card for video, and I have an ancient 3com etherlink 3 isa network card that I'm dying to see if it still works. I also need to locate an old socket 7 processor, and it can't even do 100 mhz for the cpuclock, so I'm probably going to try and snag a pentium 233 mhz mmx processor instead of a k6. I'll keep you all posted on this, and if any of you have thoughts on which distro to try, please drop me a line.

My other project is converting an acer 3680-2682 laptop from windows vista (ugh) to ubuntu intrepid 8.10. This should be interesting as well. I upgraded the ram to 1.5 gigabytes from the standard 512 megs and saw performance at least become somewhat bearable. I also know that ubuntu is no speed demon, but it should behave nicely and easily for my parents to whom this laptop is going.

The onboard video is an intel gma 950, again, no speed demon, but more than adequate for basic video needs. It has an 80 gig hard drive and a cdrw/dvd combo drive. I'll tackle this one shortly and post back here.

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