It’s taken a couple of Saturdays, but he finally has a working computer again. I was not able to get XP installed. I was using recovery disks and they just wouldn’t work. He has Ubuntu for now.
I bought the motherboard, CPU, CPU fan, and RAM from Free Geeks. Then it turned out my old power supply wouldn’t work, so I made another trip for to replace that. I couldn’t get it to boot up, so let it set for a week. The CPU fan wouldn’t seat right and the little plastic pins had splayed out and broken. Back to Free Geeks, where I found a new one, still in the package to replace that.
I went through all of it again yesterday, finally got the fans to spin. When I hooked up the monitor, I found that it wouldn’t turn on. It’s probably a power supply issue, but I decided to see what I could find second hand. I was going to check out the local second hand stores and pawn shops. That’s when I found out it was the day for the Hazel Dell parade. I couldn’t get to any of the stores I wanted to check out. So I went back to Free Geeks. I picked up a very nice Sony monitor (and a charger for the ibook project I’ll tackle next.)
When I was trying to install a version of Linux, they all kept complaining about a broken bios. A friend suggested that I use the CMOS battery from the old computer, which helped. I was able to install Ubuntu and Lon can surf the web again. I’m going to see if I can salvage anything off the old hard drive, but I suspect that the restore disk has managed to screw that up, even though it never really formated the drive or installed XP.
If I’d known it was going to be this crazy, I might have looked harder at just replacing the computer. It was a good learning experience though. I haven’t done much hardware, and I’d like to learn about newer computers. The ibook is going to be interesting. I haven’t worked on a Mac. This one doesn’t have a hard drive. To install one, you have to strip it back to the guts. I found out that the battery does seem to hold a charge and everything else seems to work. It was $30. I know it’s an obsolete computer, but I wanted one back when I worked at Charter. I think it can be useful again. Any old computer can be used for writing. This laptop needs work, so having another laptop will give me time to work on this. And I’ve been talking about volunteering at Free Geeks for awhile. They have a laptop hardware class that I’d like to take. I’ll save that for another day.
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