REPAIRING BROKEN COMPUTERS
by:
Cam Lamothe
Jeremiah and I were given a random case with absolutely no writing on it. From the case, we saw that there waws an external graphics card, external ethernet, and a few serial ports. We also have a USB card, and a very very old soundcard, as well as a very old 56K modem. There was no other writing besides the fact that it was produced in the US. It has a reset button, power button and power LED. The company that produced the computer was thinkmate. It has one floppy drive, a cd ROM drive with headphone jack, and 2 empty expansion slots. By my guess, I would assume that this computer is from the mid to late 90's. The power supply has an input and an output, and that has a fan that cools that apparatus. The only writing on the case on the case beside the brand is an FCC label, but no dates or anything on the the label.
Update:::
The motherboard on the above computer was fried. There were no lights showing up on the motherboard itself and after many tries with the graphics card, we couldn't get anything on the screen. We were forced to dump our old machine. Our new Machine is a Dell Pentium II with 384 MB of RAM. So far the only problem that we have was a fatal error in out Windows 98, causing us to need a new OS. Due to the lack of them, we are really unable to do anything software wise. We also found out that the computer has ATi graphics built in before the OS nuked itself. However, a new problem has developed. Our bios was erased and there is no way to get the BIOS onto the actual motherboard. I think that another computer is toast....
When helping Robin and Gretchen, i found a website to help them disable starting firefox and other programs at start up. That website is here.
Well, it seems that our BIOS is fine, I don't know what was going on last class. I found out the problem is the fact that our computer is simply too old to run XP, which is fairly disappointing. I'm in the process of finding linux, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to boot it.
I have finally figured out how to make a linux boot disk, I simply took the file that I had downloaded in the ISO format, and loaded it into a program called alcohol. Alcohol is a CD/DVD burning utility that is very user friendly and fairly fast. I burned two different Linuxs', DSL and SLAX, both boot from the CD. While messing around in SLAX, we have been playing with our internet and checking out the stats of out computer. It reads:
Proc. Pentium 2 with MMX technology running at 350MHz
RAM. 128MB pc100
Hard Drive(though unused) 10.2 GB
due to a problem that is unknown with installing either linux, we are unable to figure out what is going on with other software and things. Right now as I hand this in, we are still trying to figure out how to get SLAX onto the hard drive so that we arent always going through the slow process of booting from the disk.
Now on to the Q's!
- What was the computer?
The computer is a Dell Pentium II, running at 350MHz. Our problem has been a failure of operating system and some bad RAM. We had tried to upgrade the RAm to a 256 stick, but since "Windoze" couldn't tell us that the RAM was dead. We were drawing a blank until we put SLAX in and it told us esactly what was wrong. I really wish that we had tried it earlier, but oh well.
- What have you done to improve it?
We really haven't done anything. Our one attempt to add RAM to it was a disaster. It caused us to not be able to install an OS, and was really bothering us. Until the other day, we had no idea what was wrong. I suppose that if we got good ram we could throw it in there, but the hardware is so obsolete the only thing it is really good for are really simple programs like music players and word processors. It is also a good machine for messing around in with Linux.
- What else can you do to the computer?
It would be nice to find a permanent operating system, but I'm really down on windows XP lately. I doubt it would be able to work anyway, since ours is from 1996. I think it would be cool to throw the guts into an odd case, like a speaker or something, or make it into an all in one computer, with a monitor and powered speakers built in.
- If you had money, how would you spend it?
I would buy a new Intel Mac..haha. Nothing can really be spent to upgrade this computer, it is so much more worth it to purchase a new one. If that were not an option, I would probably go with all new components such as a new AMD motherboard with a GB of RAM and a new dual core processor. That would really make this computer scream
- What is the best you can make this computer be?
We really can't do much. It could be a good music storage computer with iTunes, or if there were a way to do it, I'd like to run permanent Linux on it, because I think that it could be kind of interesting to play around with and get to know what makes up the software aspect of the computer. Other than that, nothing much can be done to it without serious hardware upgrades.
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