V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 6, 2013 Share Posted December 6, 2013 Some of you may remember me talking about an old AMD Athlon K-7 system that I have out in my shop. It's not my old ericsbane02 system. I gave that one to a friend years ago after updating it a bit. He's still using it. No, this one that I'm talking about here was my brother's system. I had two good friends who were the Regional and Local managers for Gateway back in the early oughts. They put this system together for my brother back in 2000; gave him a great deal on it, too. The system was bleeding edge... HA! AMD Athlon K-7 Thunderbird processor 200W PSU 256 M RAM - PC100 SDRAM 15 Gig hard drive CDROM 3.5" Floppy 5.1 Audio card 64 K Video card 10/100 LAN card 56 K Modem card It still has that basic setup. I added a ZIP100 drive for him about a year after he bought it. It's still in there, too. This thing is a Sherman tank. It's a full size ATX case made of real heavy guage steel. No aluminum and very little plastic in this thing. It weighs a ton. The tower on the left in this pic is almost identical to my brother's... Lots of steel and many, many screws. The hdd is actually mounted sideways. All the devices are screwed in place in their respective slots using four screws each! This is a sturdy computer. You could probably stand on this thing to reach up and change your bulbs in your overhead lighting. So, I gave it a brief check over. It was supposedly working when he gave it to me a few years ago. I never plugged it in. I only wanted it because that Thunderbird CPU was such a fantastic processor. Anyway, it came right up. The Gateway screen came on. I could get into BIOS; even the time/date were still correct. The drive had been wiped, though, so no OS. I thought, "Hey... I'll see if I can slap Slackware on this baby just for funzies." I ran in the house and grabbed my Slack 14 (32 bit) DVD and ran back to the shop. I stuck that DVD into the CDROM and rebooted... 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99... What the...? I thought maybe the CDROM was bad. Hmm... Then I realized what a dummy I am... CDROMs can't read DVDs. Well, that was the end of the K-7 project for today. I'm going to have to burn a CD of an older Slackware (9 maybe) to try to install on this monster. All good fun... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted December 6, 2013 Share Posted December 6, 2013 I did that once ... Was the last time that happened It is embarrassin' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted December 6, 2013 Share Posted December 6, 2013 Again let me point out the Flash ain't gonna work on this system with Linux. I don't think K7 has SSE2 support. If you don't care about Flash or can use Gnash then you'll be OK. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 6, 2013 Author Share Posted December 6, 2013 Oh, I'm just playing around with it, Ray. I won't be using it in any production environment. It'll just be a tinker toy for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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