raymac46 Posted April 11, 2012 Share Posted April 11, 2012 Boy is there some ugly hardware out in the wild running Windows XP. My neighbor is a Cobol programmer - too old and valuable a guy to retire. He has a couple of desktops and a couple of laptops around the house. He asked me if I could dual boot his older desktop with Linux. Yesterday I got a look at this machine. It's a Compaq ca 2002. Pentium 4 1.7, and now has 2 GB of DDR RAM based on my earlier advice. The video card is a (wait for it) S3 Prosavage DDR. The mobo is an ASRock that has slots for SDRAM or DDR. He has a 40 GB hard drive with about 10 GB free and his second drive is a SATA 400GB that is hooked up to a card in a PCI slot. The motherboard obviously does not support SATA but why he got this instead of a second IDE drive escapes me. The monitor is a 19 inch CRT that weighs 1000 lbs. and is very fuzzy and poorly focused. He has only a CD-ROM so any DVD installation is out. We are going to delete a bunch of stuff on the 40GB drive, defrag and install there. I don't want to try a Linux install on the second drive and end up in kernel panic lala land. I tried Linux Mint 12 live yesterday and the video card is obviously too old and glitchy to handle kernel mode setting, so I just got a black screen. I had to add the "nomodeset" boot parameter to get going. I showed him how to do this and I'll let him play with the live CD a bit before we install. Then I'll have to put "nomodeset" in the grub2 settings. Linux advocates - be careful out there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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