This is a story about a computer with nine lives...literally!

The story begins back in the mid 1990's. My Dad, being notoriously stringent and informed in his approach to buying just about anything, figured the market was finally primed for buying a new computer. Now understand we had a computer, a Zenith Z-150 IBM PC clone from roundabouts 1983-84. That sucker was (and still is) a tank. Fodder for another blog post sometime. However Dad waited through the "numerated" Intel based PC platforms (186, 286, 386, 486) when he started reading about the new 586 "Pentium". Which I'm sure many of you may remember the huge Intel marketing campaign for those processors, including the "flying processor" commercial. However Dad being a savvy consumer also was reading about the upcoming Pentium II class processors. So he held off on buying a new Pentium or older 486 machine. The idea being to buy a powerful computer that would last for many years.

When the P-II machines finally started hitting the market, around '96 / '97 Dad had decided to custom order a machine from Dell. This would be a Dell Dimension XPS300, at the time their top-of-the-line PC platform. This computer would be "pimped" out with the latest and greatest hardware: Pentium-II 300mHz MMX processor, 16 MB RAM, Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro AGP Video Card, SoundBlaster AWE64 Audio Card, 40x CD ROM drive, and a HUGE 8GB hard drive! Couple this with a Sony Trinitron 17" monitor and a pair of Altec Lansing 2.1 virtual surround speakers. It arrived early in 1998.

By today's standards this PC is nothing special, an anachronisim,  but back then it was huge. At the time it was bought this computer shipped with Windows 95. Now consider just the 8GB hard drive. At this time most pre-configured box store model computers had 1 or 2 GB hard drives. The reason; Win95 was an odd mesh of a 16 and 32 bit operating system. Win95 uses the FAT16 file system. FAT16 only supports 2GB hard discs (or 2GB partitions). Therefore to use this hard drive fully it had to come with four 2GB partitions! This was actually useful in our case, this being the family computer, because one partition held the OS and programs while each Dad, Mom, and myself had our own "partition" for storage (and I could install and run games from mine).

With the exception of upgrading the machine to Windows98 when that hit the streets and formatting the HDD to FAT32, adding 16MB of ram, a Plextor CD-R drive, and a Maxtor 120GB HDD, for about 2-3 years this computer was pretty much the same as it had come from Dell.

Late in 2000, during a fall thunderstorm a close lightning strike surged the phone lines and blew out the modem card on the computer. It also, unfortunately, spiked the mobo and processor at the same time crippling the entire machine. Fortunately the computer was still under warranty with Dell so we RMA'd the mobo, processor, and modem back to Dell and they promptly sent out the replacement parts. Once installed, she ran just fine for two more years running the slowly aging Win98 upgrade install.

By 2002 the Win98 upgrade over Win95 configuration was becoming bloated and glitchy. At this point I had my own computer so this Dell was now just Dad's computer (mom used it infrequently). So Dad made the decision to do a major upgrade to the computer. The 8MB HDD was removed and a new 250GB drive was installed in it's place. We added a Promise IDE-133 PCI adaptor and an IEEE-1394 / USB 2.0 PCI adaptor to help speed up data transfer and expand peripheral options. We added a third, much larger RAM stick of 256MB, to the current 32MB topping up at 288 MB. Then we installed Windows 2000 Professional. Now it didn't run fast like the newer P-III machines of the day but it could keep up admirably, and did so until the end of it's life as Dad's "main" computer.

This ended when in 2005 (following my example from a year earlier) Dad bought a bare-bones high-end PC and configured it to his liking by buying premium hardware. He stripped the 250 GB HDD out of the Dell and left just the old 120GB HDD with a clean install of Windows 2000.

Dad used the Dell in this configuration as a music server using a high end USB DAC in his high-end home audio system for a time until he replaced the bulky desktop with a Mac Book notebook computer (and an external hard drive for the gigs of music).

This relegated the Dell to a closet for at least a year...however, as I said this is the computer that wouldn't die.

This Christmas Dad got me a USB DAC as a gift. I didn't have a second computer to use to power my music collection with my stereo system. However Dad did; the old Dell. So I hauled it out of the closet and over to my house. Only to discover a horrible whining sound when I powered it up. Sure it booted and seem to be running OK, but I wanted to use it to serve music into a high-end home audio system. An annoying whining sound was obviously undesirable. My first thought was that either the case fan or the PSU fan had a bad bearing, but upon inspection neither of these fans was making any overt noises. A closer inspection found that it was the old HDD whining. My guess is that there was a bad bearing somewhere in the HDD, but they don't make that sound for a good reason so the only reasonable choice was to replace it. A Seagate 160 PATA drive did the trick.

However once I swapped out the drive I needed to reinstall the OS, and unfortunately I couldn't find my copy of Windows 2000 Pro anywhere and Dad didn't have it either. My only option was either Windows 98se or Windows XP Pro (I have Windows ME too, but is that really an option?). I opted to take a gamble and try running Windows XP Pro on the old hardware.

The gamble seems to have paid off. Lo and behold XP runs rather well. That's right I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2 on 10 year old hardware with a Pentium-II 300mHz processor and 288MB of RAM! And it's not as sluggish as you'd think. Now granted I doubt I'd want to use it regularly on a daily basis or try running anything like a modern game or high-powered graphics software but it does what it's intended to do quite well. I even added a cheap wireless card and got 'er online via cable internet.

This computer sits with my TV and all my home theatre and stereo electronics in my living room (no it doesn't look THAT bad you ladies out there). It actually sits next directly next to my TV. Now I knew that it wouldn't run new games, but I am a big fan of Nintendo and Super Nintendo games, and I have the ROM images of most of my favorite games that can be played via an emulator (I also reverse engineer some of my own hacks for them too). So the idea of running my console emulators on ol' bessy via the TV seemed like an ideal multi-purpose of the computer since, well, it was there.

Of course in 1998 the idea of hooking up a computer to a TV wasn't very widespread or common, like HDPC's are these days. While the Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro was a top end graphics card for it's day, it only has a single VGA output. So I took a look at the various offerings of video cards today and found that there still were some fairly low end PCI (standard PCI not "E") graphics cards around today at budget prices which would be a significant hardware upgrade for a computer as old as the old Dell. The one I found was a Diamond Stealth V70 ATI Radeon 7000 32MB card with VGA, DVI, and S-Video output and was capable of running dual monitors. I guess it's Karma to find an ideal replacement for a 10 year old Diamond card with another Diamond card. Anyway Diamond's specs for this card were of course much higher than the old Dell's system but I figured, well it's cheap enough ($34.99 @ NewEgg) that even if I have to eat it I can use it on something else (I mean heck it's a standard PCI card, it would work in almost any computer).

Surprise again, I swapped in the new video card into the old Dell and voila! Ran just fine. Although the Diamond card is an ATI card it didn't come with ATI's graphics software so I had some trouble getting the card to do exactly what I wanted. Principally I wanted to run ZSNES (A Super Nintendo console emulator) on the TV but the S-Video output had to be set to the primary monitor since ZSNES doesn't support multiple monitors (it won't drag to or full-screen in a secondary monitor). The default windows display management wouldn't let the S-Video output be set to primary. Fortunately I have an ASUS ATI Radeon 9600 SE card on my principle computer rig so I did have the ATI graphics software and installed it. That solved the problem.

Thus, after picking up a 16ft USB extension and a USB game controller I can now sit in my living room and play classic console games via my media computer. Not to mention the original purpose of playing music through the stereo.

So that's how a old Dell Pentium-II computer wouldn't die. It's had every windows (home or pro) operating system on it since Win95 and prior to Vista except for NT 4.0 and WinME. It's been hit by lightning and resurrected. And continues to find a purpose today.

Might make you think twice about throwing out or donating that old PC you might have around if you have a light-weight media purpose!