My Family’s old computer was retired in late October and replaced with HP. This four year old Dell XPS didn’t run for more than five minutes before freezing. This was most likely due to the massive about of malicious software and zounds of applications that had been installed on it throughout the years. On top of that, the ATI video card didn’t work have the time and eventually burnt out in the end. The sound card was shot as well. I found this to be a very opportunity to learn more about computer hardware. I had been planning for a while to start playing around with Linux. The Dell XPS would be the perfect computer to learn it on. All I needed to do was clean it up and replace a couple of parts.
I started out by getting a new video card so I could have a working display. A cheap ATI Radeon HD 256 Mb sufficed. I then reformatted the hard drive. I deleted the C partition and created a new one. I used an old Windows XP installation disk to install an operating system. Throughout the next couple of days I downloaded and installed updates. I used CDs to install the drivers for the ATI video card (Windows didn’t recognize the card until I got the SP2 update. I installed AVG Internet Security suite and updated it as well.
This is how far I have gotten over a period of three days. A big obstacle that I face while doing this stuff at home is my Satellite Internet service provider. It is very unreliable, sluggish, and has a 128 Mb daily bandwidth limit. I reached this in a couple of hours, my ISP then kicked me down to sub-56k levels.
I plan on buying a TV-tuner card , 320 Gb hard drive, sound card, and 2Gb of memory. I will install this hardware when I am back up in State College next week. My Linux ambitions have lead me to Ubuntu. I will continue resurrection of the Blue Beast in the near future.