A while back I found a Dell 4500S (2002) in the woods. Today I decided
to procrastinate (job search) by not procrastinating (geekery), so I
plugged an old PSU (the original PSU looked busted) and push the dreaded
button. For the record, I saw this machine 2 days before I finally
picked it up, it was probably there for 2 full nights with rainy
sessions. Anyway, #1 it boots, it's stable. But it's 2002 and usb boot is not included in mainstream BIOS, so I dug up an old Knoppix. And yay, hello KDE3.
For fun I hand-copied a weird ANSI C program as a benchmark Pi calculation in Emacs 21. Was fun to do except for the fact that my fingers have internalized 12 inches ThinkPad keyboards and I miss half my strokes. The bench was too old to be of any use, 0.130s to run.
#2 Out of curiosity I tried the original PSU. It's a slim design, very neat, with a low noise fan. Quite cool. It's almost silent compared to my crappy ATX one.
I need to test networking and a more recent distro. In the end I'll probably give it away to charity, it's faster than a raspberry pi so they may want it.
Oh, some last minute things: 'they' took the hdd before throwing it. The BIOS seems DELL specific, and includes a log store; last event is from 2002. Weird.
ps: shit, this thing doesn't even have an ethernet chip, and the only extension slot is a slim thing, I doubt I can fit one of my old pci wifi card. Knoppix is too old for usb wifi it seems. I need to burn an old Linux Mint on a cd, 2000 style.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire