Update on my Oldest Computer

Something interesting happened today that I decided to write about. Not that I don’t find interesting things to write about almost daily.

I installed updates on all my computers yesterday. All of them rebooted without a problem, except for Intrepid, my 20 year-old Dell, which locked up during BIOS boot with an error code displayed on the front panel. That’s not the thing but it did precipitate the thing.

The Dell is normally downstairs and I was taking it upstairs to my laboratory. Because it’s a tower, it’s a bit clumsy to handle, so I did what I’ve done before with it and other computers, I wrapped a strap around it to make it easier to carry up the stairs.

I was two-thirds of the way upstairs when I felt the computer slide out of the strap — which I obviously hadn’t tightened enough. It crashed down the steps, generating a huge amount of noise that had the dog barking an my wife scrambling to make sure it wasn’t me bouncing off the hardwood floor.

All was good with me as I wasn’t stupid enough to try to catch it, but the computer dug a chunk out of that floor. And there were bits of it all over the floor. Mostly plastic bits, and the entire right side panel, which is the side that provides access to the internals for assembly and maintenance.

The metal frame is bent up enough that the side panel will never fit properly again. The assembly that contains the DVD drive and, if there there was one, a floppy disk drive, is now hanging a bit askew.

Nevertheless, I connected the old Dell to KVM, network, and power. I turned it on and it hung with an error during BIOS boot. The error indicated that the floppy drive couldn’t be found. That was correct, since there’s no floppy drive in the system. I reconfigured BIOS to disable the floppy, and it booted just fine.

I know that most computers are well built. IBM was famous for that. Now I must say — despite my badmouthing Dell for their proprietary and non-standard hardware design — that they do seem to be as rugged as a small tank.

I might need to use duct tape to ensure the side panel stays on, but I’m going to keep using it and see just how long I can keep an old, abused Pentium 4 computer running on Linux.