[geeks] Like I opened a time capsule...

[Lionel Peterson]

Hello all,

I am starting to go through my basement, uncovering things buried since I moved a few years ago, and came across a couple "treasures" - a couple Dell Desktops in damn-near new condition,in original boxes with all discs, etc.

As best as I can recall, they were bought when the LCD market was all topsy-turvey, and you could get a Dell flat panel for abotu $50-100 more than a comprable retailer, with a low-end PC thrown in.

I found a Dell Dimension 2350 and Dimension 2400, bit older systems, based on Intel 845 chipsets and integrated graphics, networking, etc. One has a 1.7 GHz Celeron and the other has a 2 GHz Pentium 4, IIRC, each has about 128 Meg of RAM, and smaler HDs (20-40 Gig range, again, IIRC). One (the 2400) even has an included copy of MS Office 2003 Basic (Access not included?)...

Anyway, I'm considering what to do with them, and while there's nothing wrong with them, they don't have any real appeal when compared with modern low-end computers. I'll probably trick them out a little bit and make a low-end desktop and server out of them. I can stuff a 3 SATA drive in 2 5 1/4" bay carrier in one, bump the RAM up to 1 Gig and make a small server for our vacation home, and take the P4 system to 2 Gigs of RAM and make that a desktop. For simple, occasional desktop use, IDE-based P4 systems aren't bad, and the Celeron running some *nix variant should make a fine server for one desktop plus a couple transient laptops...

Anyway, it is sort of interesting to think of ways to upgrade the machines without spending so much money that the cost of improvements doesn't exceed the cost of a new system with faster, more modern components (for example, I have the three-in-two hot swap tray on-hand, so that's easy to justify, but the HDs will be whatever SATA drives I have around, and the controller will only be SATA-150, since it is PCI, and I really can't justify spending more than about $35 for a JBOD controller (soft RAID should be fine, at this level of usage), OR I could stuff a PCI IDE controller in each of them, and bump the IDE port to 133 instead of 100... Also, I think CPU upgrades will be prohibitive (a 478 pin P4 with 400 MHz front bus is old enough to have become expensive again, i.e. more expensive than a cheap Core 2  Duo)...

Anyway, just thought I'd share... They are cute little machines though...

Lionel