Of course less than a week after Michael spends lots of time to detail all the machines on our network, I bring home another to add to his list :)
I’m friendly with some of the IT guys at work, and the other day one of them was cleaning out one of the “old computer junk” closets. I happen to notice that he’s throwing a bunch of Dell laptop docking stations into a box, so I stopped to ask what was going to happen to all of them.
“We just throw out the docking stations, why, do you want one?”
“My personal laptop is old, but I’ll bring it in tomorrow and see if one of these stations will work with it!”
On Friday I brought my laptop in and went into the warehouse where the piles of old computer junk was piled. Alas, all the docking stations I found were for Dell Latitude notebooks, not Inspirons. Dejected, I walked passed the IT office, said “nope, only Latitude docking stations out there, no Inspirons.”
One of my IT buddies got up and pondered this, “I think there still might be one in the other building, wait here.” So he went to the other building, and came back with a Dell Port Replicator II, the docking station for the Inspiron! ROCK!
“Do you need a power supply too?”
Sure.
So he goes and gets the power supply, and returns with a power supply in one hand and a laptop that looks very similar to mine in the other.
“Here’s the power supply, and this is an even older Inspiron than yours, but you might want it for parts?”
It was a Pentium 2, I don’t need more old computers!
“Really, if you don’t take this we’re going to throw it away. I think it’s got a 4 gig harddrive in it that could be used.”
I was persuaded, my Inspiron only has a 3 gig harddrive, I figured that even if it was too old to be useful I could pop out the harddrive and use it in my laptop.
I spent some time on my lunch break pulling up the specs on this Inspiron 7000 and found this site – it’s a pretty decent machine! 366mhz, 128M ram (only can upgrade to 192). It was slightly beat up, doesn’t lock closed properly when you close it, but if this machine actually runs it could be a perfect machine to set up with a wireless NIC in the magic room.
So after confirming that I wouldn’t get in trouble for walking off with company propery (“Nope, it’s been off the books for years, we didn’t even realize it was still around”) I brought it home.
This morning I put in the Ubuntu Dapper Server install CD in and installed it. Got it running with XFCE4 and all. It runs great, these old Dell laptops are great! And even better, it doesn’t have a 4 gig harddrive – it has a 10 gig harddrive! So I’ll probably be putting this harddrive in my laptop to replace the 3 gig one. The only disappointment is with Dapper itself, it still isn’t seeing my Wireless NIC – a flaw I hoped was fixed since the official release, looks like I’ll be sticking with Breezy on my laptop until I find the solution.
I totally scored.
And now DarkSol is sitting next to me using the laptop :) I’d hate to make his visit a side note on an entry about computers, so I’ll blabber on about our weekend with him visiting later %)