PC plod

Geeks,
I pulled my old pc out of the cupboard yesterday to try and plug my new digi camera into it. I think its pretty screwed though….slow to start up with a couple of niggles, the odd blue screen of death and couldn't sort out the camera on it, its generally old and tired even after a defrag and cleanup. Whats the best thing to do with it to sort it out? Will reformatting it sort it out? I only want to use it to stick pics on for editing and writing to a cd and have nothing on it of any importance. Will wiping it clean do the trick or is it terminal? It was new in 1999 so not quite an abacus.
Tom

 

i use a similar vintage pc as a music server (p2 400 mhz, 64 mb mem - upgraded to 320). i deleted everything off it- gave it a virus scan, adaware, spybot, etc. to get rid of any crap and then installed windoze xp on it. it's now pretty ok for what i use it for. i really did need the memory though.
cheers

julian

 

yeah, I agree with julian....you should re-install with a newer OS - what you got now..?? win98..?

you really need XP, that can handle usb digi camera without any problems...

make sure you archive any stuff (i.e. your porn) from ya pc first tho...

 

Personaly I wouldn't even try and use XP if I didn;t have 256MB RAM. XP requires 128MB RAM just to properly boot therefore as soon as you start running any application such as photoshop you're PC will use virtual memory and will be very slow. Upgrading should cost peanuts though.

I think for a PC of this vintage either Windows 2000 or a version of Linux running the latest kernal but stripped down desktop manager will be much better.

A 1999 PC can be used perfectly just not with XP or 98.

 

Cheers Cat...I'll stick it all on a library of cd's catalogued by species! Thats a joke by btw.
I got windows 98 so I'll uninstall that and everything else and put xp on it and see if I have any virus scans that I can run on it. You don't think its worth taking it anwhere to be sorted out then?

Edit: ah right AT...maybe some more memory needed too then

 

yeah, amazingtrade is also correct -you'll need more memory...just that win98 is useless with usb stuff...

 

Yep USB is why I decided to change to linux on my laptop. I didn't have a copy of Win2000 to spare, 98 is too old and XP is to bloaty so I decided linux was the perfect solution. It is a nightmare to install properly on older machines though so unless you know a lot about operating systems I would stick with Win 2k if you can get a copy.

A 500Mhz processor will work with XP as longs as you turn of all the fancy icons and animations.

 

errrr, i beg to differ. i was under the mistaken impression that my 'older' pc had 128 mb of memory when one of the memory 'sticks' had gone kaput and in reality i only had 64. yes it wasn;t quick but it booted and ran slimserver just fine 90% of the time. of course more memory is better but seeing as you can find 128 meg for about 20 quid these days it's a bit of a no brainer to go for the more modern o/s. also 500mhz is more than adequate - as i said my old pentium 2 400mhz works just dandy - even with full colour icons etc.

get hold of avg, zone alarm, adaware and spytbot search and destroy. another useful thing is a set of utilities called tune up which allows you easy access to the more esoteric stuff hidden by xp and hold your hand through things like defragging the registry and other stuff like that. with that little lot on there i'm sure your pc will have a new lease of life. if you're not confident aobut doing it then get someone in but it's probably worth while having a go yourself first and then paying for somone to fix it if you get it wrong. but back up your por... er data first.
cheers


julian


oh and if / when you install xp - use the 'upgrade' option as it will preserve all those old drivers for outdated modems and graphics cards that you may not have the driver disks for anymore. makes things a lot easier....