Breathed new life into an old Dell Dimension desktop

[DaviDC.]

This thing took at least 15 minutes to start up with XP & was always slooooow.
I finally managed to get ubuntu 10.10 installed on it & now it starts up in less than 2 minutes.

I dug around in my junk drawer & found a 160 GB hard drive to put in it & swapped out the CD drive for a DVD drive.

It's got 256 MB of DDR SDRAM & I know that's got to be a hinderance. As hard as I've looked, there doesn't seem to be any spare RAM of that type around here. Still, it's now a much better computer than when I brought it home.

[mattkime]

i did that recently too. worked really well. i was impressed.

whatcha gonna use it for?

[DaviDC.]

I have absolutely no use at all for it.

[lafinfil]

Put it out on the back porch. The heat should keep the washer from freezing again.

[DaviDC.]

lafinfil wrote:
Put it out on the back porch. The heat should keep the washer from freezing again.

It doesn't seem to put out that much heat. Nothing at all like a G5 tower.

I just tried to play a DVD in it but had no luck. I looked for a different DVD player but got bored so I shut it down for the evening. Using that gargantuan Dell keyboard on a board on my lap does not make for a pleasant computing experience. I need a compact keyboard but don't plan on spending any money on this beast. That's something I might be able to come across at a thrift store.

[silvarios]

You have to install the appropriate tools to decrypt the DVD.

[DaviDC.]

VLC wouldn't play it either.

[mattkime]

I donated through this org - http://www.cristina.org/donate.html

the machine was placed with an nyc public school. they picked it up.

much better than tossing the machine.

[silvarios]

DaviDC. wrote:
VLC wouldn't play it either.

libdvdcss2, VLC won't work without the right library.