PC Salvage

I temporarily pulled the 64MB PC100 DIM out of this Compaq PC today, along with the Philips CD-RW, and managed to boot that junked PC I got last week. Turns out the CPU is an AMD Duron 800MHz, which would have been my last guess. Still, it's better than I expected. The Duron is a vastly underappreciated processor. The primary, 40GB hard drive had Win98 installed, along with a huge amount of useless garbage. The system tray had 13 icons in it before I started ending tasks. I couldn't access the second hard drive, but later I realized it was because its previous owners had connected the secondary IDE cable connector to the master drive. The second drive is 30GB, and I think I might just wipe it before I get around to seeing what's on there. This box is in serious need of a clean format/reinstall of Windows.

All I need to make this machine usable is a power cable, an internal audio cord to connect the PCI sound board to the CD drive -- both of which I know I have somewhere -- and a stick of RAM, which I'll be buying this week. The only snag is that while I know this machine can use PC66/100/133 RAM, I have no idea if the motherboard supports DDR RAM, which would mean I could get a 256MB PC3200 stick for cheaper than a 128MB PC100 stick. Hopefully, the random PC guy at Office Depot will know...

In any case, I'm looking forward to using it as a primarily offline time-killing machine, as it ran Half-Life very nicely at 1024 in my short test, despite some awful texture tearing. That should be resolved by the Radeon 7200 drivers I'm running on this box, as well as the huge RAM upgrade. I think I'll also leave the CD burner in this Compaq and put the DVD-ROM in the junker, as it should have significantly better DVD-playback capabilities.