August 20th, 2024

Celery.

Don't eat it.

Sad News.

In Albis the Dominique died Saturday, August 10th, 2024.

A Use for the Celery Dell.

I have a Dell Dimension 2100. It’s just a boring old, bog standard Intel Celeron office PC with 300 and something megabytes of RAM, and lovely cheap-o integrated graphics, straight from Intel. It’s been sitting on a shelf for some time, since the thing’s so wonderfully underpowered that I’ve had no reason to really do much with it. And then I had a idea. I’d always wanted to mess around with prototype pre-release versions of Windows, especially XP and Vista (Whistler and Longhorn, if you prefer). So I grabbed that thing off the shelf. I had put a spare 160GB PATA (Parallel ATA) hard drive in there, but I decided I did not want to wipe my install of Windows ME, and instead used my PATA to SATA (Serial ATA) adapter to plug in a normal old SSD. From there, I tried installing Whistler Build 2202. All it did was blue screen upon boot. “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE” was all it kept whining about. So I went ahead, did some research on the issue, and as it turns out you need a boot disk. I ended up with a Windows 98 SE boot disc, and a Windows 98 CD to run the format command (I couldn’t figure out why format didn’t work on the boot disk). First was fdisk on the C: drive. From there, it was switching over to the CD in DOS, then running format. Then I ejected the CD, put in the Whistler 2202 disc, and then ran the setup from DOS. That worked good enough, and I got essentially a Windows 2000 thing installed. I need to make a more in-depth tutorial on the subject. It was a royal pain trying to find anything other than videos on it. Most newer builds of Whistler don’t need to be booted off of DOS, as far as I know.

I did end up switching over to my Shuttle SK43G later on, but ran into some problems with the FX5200 I stuck in there (I suppose it was too new) and ran into some other issues with the Geforce Ti4800SE I took from the Yard Sale PC as well, though the driver actually installed. I have since switched to trying out Longhorn builds but haven’t spent much time on trying them out yet. The one I tried (3683) is really buggy. Won’t run well on that Sempron 3000+ in that Shuttle at all.

Yard Sale PC.

I did end up installing Windows 98 SE on the Yard Sale PC, and I ended up getting it mostly working. USB doesn’t seem to work right (I need to find the drivers for that), but other than that, it works just fine.

Tutorials

I’ve decided to also start making a few readable and hopefully usable tutorials for computer things, especially things I can’t find a good one for. I’ve had issues finding good ones for several things, but if I can manage to make it work, I’ll try and write down what I did so that others can use the information.

Pictures.

In Albis the Dominique.

The Dell Dimension 2100.

Inside the Dell.

SSD tucked inside the Dell.