Old Trash of a Desktop

I scored a free desktop rig from my boss at work. Ancient. Even came with one of those 1950's-era Cathode Ray Tube displays. I'll crack it open and see how old it is, then power it up and see if it has something old in it, like Windows 98SE or something in it. Maybe I can run old games on it, or give it to my kid to play on, keep her from messing with mine or mommie's laptops.

That, or OVERCLOCK IT TILL IT BLOWS THE MAGIC SMOKE!!!!!!!!1!1!111one1!!1

Okay, so I get it out of my car and into the house, and I'm struck by the total and complete lack of USB ports. Then, the presence of a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. So it's at least ten years old, possibly older. My boss threw in a mouse but no keyboard, so I had to scrounge for the one remaining keyboard I have left that has the older typical roundy connector.

Hook all that up, including the ancient 15-inch CRT monitor that weighs a ton. Fire it up, motherboard runs it's POST, and I find that it has 32 megs of RAM and a 166Mhz processor, so it's either a high end first-gen Pentium or an early Pentium Pro. It runs checkdisk, apparently it remembered tht it was not shut down properly way back when. Pass. Tries to load Windows 95. Oh my, I think. This thing is OLD. Fails, it simply hangs, so I hit he reset button that is largely absent on modern machines nowadays. It kicks it into wanting to start to do safe mode, which I accept. It boots, and I'm staring at a 256-color display. CD-ROM drive drivers either aren't loaded in safe mode, or that might be where my fault is. It has a 2.5 GB hard-drie, partitioned into two partitions, and it has only 900 MB filled. Took off some useless programs that were still installed, AOL among them, and re-discover the joys of Adobe AfterDark. Ah, memories. Try to find the file that tells it what drivers to load, but typing 'msconfig' in the run command gets me an error. Probably too old.

Glad I have a 1997-era 'Fix Your Own Computer' book, big fat sucker of a repair manual that has pertinent information on dinosaur machines like this. Maybe I'm lucky and it takes 72-pin RAM, I might still have some in my junk parts bin. I'll crack open the case sometime and see if I can cram in my 128MB AGP video card I just couldn't bear to throw away.

Anyone got any early Pentium processors they don't want, or a copy of Windows 98SE? I'll toss in some more RAM and shove in my old 40GB hard drive, and see if it'll handle 98SE.

Then I'll give it to my daughter as a standalone, woot.