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Jan. 26th, 2007
It is, by today's standard, a fairly thin CPU: a P3 running at 1.1GHz with 256meg of ram. Today, since I would be at school/work for eight hours with mostly boredom looking me in the eye, I decided to reformat the C: drive and get rid of Windows XP Pro and re-install 2000 Pro, the original OS on my Thinkpad T23. I had backed up my Zone Alarm configuration, so I wouldn't have to do any reconfiguration for that. And most of my software is copied onto my hard drive in zip format, so all it would take is time.
Installing 2000 Pro and Service Pack 4 went really quick, including reformatting the C: partition (where ONLY the operating system and system-level utilities reside) took less than an hour. The frightening thing is that with just 2000 and SP4, the system only needs about 60 meg of ram! Remarkable.
I was very tempted to not install the rest of the security updates and other update crap, but I bit the bullet and did them, and memory required jumped up to 150meg+. But I made a discovery while talking to Jim, my co-worker: for some reason my computer was reporting only 128meg of ram!
Reboots, bios screen, etc, only 128. So I powered it off, popped off the memory compartment cover (I always carry a Leatherman tool), and swapped the two 128 meg chips. Power on, go into bios, and the system is now reporting 256 meg.
Not what I was expecting. I had anticipated a scenario where the high level chip had died and that swapping them would result in a machine that wouldn't boot: my original thought was that either the chip was dead, the socket had failed (it does happen), or the controller had a problem and that swapping chips would prove that one had failed. I was more than a bit surprised. So far, all seems well, I suspect that simply re-seating the chips would have made the second one visible to the hardware.
So we'll see how thing progress. I've got DirectX 9 installing right now, then it'll be getting the sound system working and iTunes reconfigured as we're going to Albuquerque tomorrow to see the Abba musical, Mama Mia!
WHEEE!!!
Installing 2000 Pro and Service Pack 4 went really quick, including reformatting the C: partition (where ONLY the operating system and system-level utilities reside) took less than an hour. The frightening thing is that with just 2000 and SP4, the system only needs about 60 meg of ram! Remarkable.
I was very tempted to not install the rest of the security updates and other update crap, but I bit the bullet and did them, and memory required jumped up to 150meg+. But I made a discovery while talking to Jim, my co-worker: for some reason my computer was reporting only 128meg of ram!
Reboots, bios screen, etc, only 128. So I powered it off, popped off the memory compartment cover (I always carry a Leatherman tool), and swapped the two 128 meg chips. Power on, go into bios, and the system is now reporting 256 meg.
Not what I was expecting. I had anticipated a scenario where the high level chip had died and that swapping them would result in a machine that wouldn't boot: my original thought was that either the chip was dead, the socket had failed (it does happen), or the controller had a problem and that swapping chips would prove that one had failed. I was more than a bit surprised. So far, all seems well, I suspect that simply re-seating the chips would have made the second one visible to the hardware.
So we'll see how thing progress. I've got DirectX 9 installing right now, then it'll be getting the sound system working and iTunes reconfigured as we're going to Albuquerque tomorrow to see the Abba musical, Mama Mia!
WHEEE!!!