AAUGH!!! 😫

I had that installed for a while. Didn't much care for it. jspaint though, is an exact clone of the XP era windows variant. It works right in your browser on any computer. Even chromebooks! There's also .exc and .deb versions for windows and linux you can install and use offline. Installed on my setup without a hitch. Now if only I could get Linux to run Star Office 5.1...

Really surprised me it wouldn't run correctly, since it's an early Linux derivative. Like trying to run old windows 98 software on windows 11 I suppose. I had high hopes for LibreOffice, a successor of StarOffice, but one of the components of SO, StarImage was left out. Otherwise it's near identical. I've yet to find an alternative as good or as simple to use.

Okay, out with the old in with the... well, not so old. Scored a pretty sweet Dell Optiplex 990 MT from a thrift store on eBay. No hdd, but does have an optical drive, 8 GB ddr3 ram installed (expandable to 16 GB) along with an i5 2600 processor. Low spec by today's standards I suppose, but I plan to make this a legacy Windows XP machine so I can run my older software and games. Should workout nicely since the 990 was a transition model available with both Windows XP and Windows 7. Dell has excellent driver support as well. I'll also be installing Windows XP Integral. That's an unofficial community made version of XP with modern security protocols and drivers. It also bypasses the 4 GB ram restriction of the original XP variant.

I haven't tested this unit yet, but I figured for a mere $38 I'd either end up with a great bargain or reasonable priced spare parts! Even if it turns out to be neither though, at least the money will have gone to a good cause. So, let the adventure begin!

Quick update. Just finished running onboard diagnostics. Whoop! Whoop! 🎉 This bad boy passed with flying colors and booted right into Linux from a thumb drive without issue! Just need to install the hdd and OS and I should be back in business. All for $38!

Good for you Mr. Franz 👍
Don't you just love a good deal.

Sounds like a bargain, if it works as expected.

Yeah it tested out 100%. I wasn't really expecting that. Seller did say they were corporate computers that the company donated minus their hard drives when they decided to upgrade. Seller said some of them had never even been deployed or put into service. I think this must have been one of those. There's a little dust inside the case, but the power supply and fans are clean as a whistle. So I'm thinking that's just from sitting around in a storeroom.

Wow, that was a good score 👍👍👍

In the cheapskate realm, I'm a fully paid, card carrying party member. I can sniff out a good deal from miles away. When I saw that listing, it set my miserly senses all a quiver. 🤣

Just finished cleaning up what little dust there was, replacing the coin battery and renewing the thermal paste, which as I suspected was hard as a rock after sitting for all those years. I mean, look at this thing. You could bloody eat off it!

No Graphic card? Or you just removed it while cleaning?

No dedicated GPU, but what's built into the i5 processor is decent enough for now. Plenty of room to expand though, should I decide to upgrade in future.

Nice - I've bought a couple of similar base units myself which have served me well
It doesn't look like it'll be much of a struggle to swap out the PSU if it fails ... which can be an issue with the name brands
Check the stickers and look up the numbers, if there are any. I found working Windows serial numbers, for all of mine, either on the stickers or the Dell website.

Oh yeah, gobs of room in there. 4 screws and a clip, the PSU is out! All stickers are intact and more importantly, readable! Both Dell service tag code and windows licenses.

DAMN IT!!!! 🤬
Thought I'd cracked it. I got this bright idea to mount my old drive inside the new computer, then boot into Linux from a thumb drive and try to recover my files. All other attempts to recover them from Windows devices indicated the drive was raw and empty, which I know damn right well in not the case.

Anyway, I get everything ready and low and behold, there's all my lost files! Well.... all the file folders anyway. Attempts to recover anything inside them, mostly just returns input/output errors. So I was only able to recover but a small amount. Unfortunately ones I already have backups of... 🙄

Sounds like that drive is fried!
Wonder if there is any dedicated programs that can get the info from a fried drive like this? I know there are expensive service that can have a look, but you have to mail your hard drive to them.

Well there is a Linux utility that can pull information off a drive bit by bit and sort of remap it. That might be an option. Nothing on there worth paying a service to extract though. Chatgpt seems to think my earlier attempts to recover data using photorec and testdisk may have actually corrupted the file paths and now the system can't figure out where one files begins and another ends. If that's the case, it's possible that Linux utility could reestablish those paths. I might give that a try. It's all done in the terminal though, so might be a bit dodgy.

Anything done in the terminal I get Claude or Chatgpt to guide me. I don't have a clue!

That's what I'm afraid of. The last time I followed Chatgpt's direction, I ended up having to reconfigure my desktop. Still not quite right.

Thats the chance you take, but generally they do good.
Especially these latest models.