Deimos and Callisto

Question: What do you do when your workplace decides it wants to give away, free of charge, half a dozen old, OLD computers that it no longer needs? Answer: If you’re me, you take as many as you can get!

A while back, I posted about the old Dell Dimension XPS D300 I revived and outfitted as a DOS gaming machine. While looking for some client books in a seldom-visited section of our new office space last week, I ran across a pair of cubicles that were crammed full of old Dell machines exactly like my D300. All of them were in various states of disrepair. None of them had CD-ROM drives. Some had tongue-like ribbon cables snaking out of their empty drive bay “mouths”. Others had detatched expansion cards stuffed into places where they certainly didn’t belong. Many of the machines had Post-It® notes stuck on them which described their condition, ranging from “Bad video card” to “REALLY hosed.” Amusingly, there were screwdrivers and other tools strewn about, as if some Chief Nerd had been working here and only recently had gotten up to leave.

It occurred to me that none of these machines were likely to see actual service at my company again, so I asked the IT manager what his plans were for them. He said he’d check in with the Big Boss and see what the word was. A few days later, an internal memo was passed around to everyone from the CFO, stating that we were getting rid of some old computers and that employees could take them home for free.

Boo-yah! Obviously I jumped at the chance. Parts as old as the ones in my Dell aren’t easy to come by anymore, and after a recent incident where I thought I’d fried the motherboard (fortunately the “Clear CMOS” jumper saved the day again), I figured it would be a good idea to have some spare parts on hand. Better yet, there were two machines that were actually D333s—slightly faster processors than the one in my box, but still compatible with the same motherboard—so I requested dibs on both of them.

Today I get to take them home. They each come with no CD-ROM drive or hard drive, but they have everything else intact. One of them was once the old server we used to run as a testing environment for client sites, and as such it has a more server-like configuration, complete with an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller card and a tape backup drive. The other looks like it was an original graphic design machine, because it has an 8 MB Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro graphics board. Dell’s support site is really cool, because you can plug in your system’s service tag—no matter how old—and instantly get access to the original build sheet, documentation, specs and driver downloads.

Since the D300—which was originally my main machine in ‘97—is named Phobos (one of the moons of Mars, and a locale you visit in the game Doom), I named one of the new D333s Deimos (the other moon of Mars). Since Mars has only two moons, I named the other D333 Callisto, which is a satellite of Jupiter. Any decent tech knows that you have to name your machines—it’s only right—and that doing so makes it easier to tell all the PCs on your network apart. My friend Pooch was recently remarking that he would like an old DOS game box to play with too, so I’m planning to offer Callisto to him. The only trick is, somebody’s gonna have to come get the machine, as I have nothing to ship it in. You guys up for a trip back to Florida?

I think now it’s time to clean out my closet and get rid of the crappy IBM and Advantage!Adventure computers I’ve got stuffed back there; I’ve pretty much already rid them of any useful components. Then I plan to upgrade Phobos with the 333 Mhz Pentium II processor from Deimos, add some more RAM, and put the rest in storage. w00t! It’s a weekend a dork would be proud of!