IT - 2008 Style

[raymac46]

Spent the morning working on my ancient Dell Inspiron 530 desktop system.

It crashed while playing music and then any attempt to reboot gave 4 short beeps and no post. Checked the Internet and this means some sort of RAM/Clock issue. So I put it on the bench, removed and reseated the RAM after cleaning the slots and also replaced the CMOS battery. Old Dells are notorious for glitching if the CMOS battery is bad.

Then I got a post but my BIOS setup was toast and I couldn't get my wireless keyboard to work. After I took the batteries out of the keyboard and put them back in, the wireless keyboard worked. So I reset the boot order and disabled the floppy drive (the desktop doesn't have one obviously.)

I took advantage of the downtime to update the old Spiral Linux installation I have on this unit. Now it's back to blasting out 70s and 80s rock and roll.

Gotta love these bulletproof old desktops.

[securitybreach]

Fun times..

[raymac46]

Yes this is a system that is very useful in what it does and absolutely not worth doing anything major to if it fails.

[raymac46]

Had the old Dell running for 30 minutes today while I used the treadmill in the basement. Everything went fine.

It originally ran Vista and had a low end Pentium dual core in it. I did a lot of upgrades:

• CPU upgraded to E8400 Core 2 Duo
• DDR2 memory upgraded to 8 MB after BIOS upgrade.
• Added 250 GB SSD. It's only a SATA I controller but it works fairly well.
• Added Nvidia GTX 950 video card.
• Added larger ATX power supply.
• Put in USB wifi dongle.

Everything was done with junk parts, so basically it was just the time to do it. The monitor, sound system, mouse and keyboard are also used. A light Linux install works great.

I originally fixed it up for my granddaughter but she's got a better desktop now so I just brought it back here, and hooked it up as a jukebox.

Edited July 4, 2024 by raymac46

[securitybreach]

If you can browse the internet with it, then its good enough to keep around.

[raymac46]

My granddaughter used it with Google Educational Suite for over a year. It's OK for light usage.

[crp]

8 hours ago, raymac46 said:

Added 250 GB SSD. It's only a SATA I controller but it works fairly well.

"Only a SATA" ??? what is the problem with being SATA, even if it is original SATA?

[raymac46]

Considering we have NVMe and PCIe 5 by now, SATA I seems pretty antiquated. Where did I say there was a problem?

[raymac46]

A few more musings about why this Inspiron 530 desktop has been so great over the years, and arguably still is:

1. The Inspiron 530 replaced the Dimension line of top consumer grade desktops and was the first line of Dell desktops built offshore. Dell was anxious to maintain quality.
2. The motherboard is a Foxconn but entirely a stock mATX item. No funky proprietary stuff. Easy to upgrade.
3. The mid tower design gives lots of room to drop in a video card. It's PCIe so anything built in the last 10+ years will work.
4. The CPUs are cheap and there's a great variety still out there. These chips were Intel's first great step into multicore design and run well even today.
5. A lot of "modern" features were built into the motherboard - SATA controllers, PCIe, 7.1 audio, USB2, BIOS upgrade for up to 8GB of RAM.

You won't be doing any serious gaming or video editing on it, but it's holding up pretty well for something that hit the market 16 years ago.