Can I have a hug?

[Der Cute]

I went through 12 hours of torture.
I reinstalled XP to a Celeron P3 with 128 SHARED Ram, Compaq Presario laptop.
At least the cd had SP2 on it, but I had to add SP3 and some anti-virus.

Christ almighty. Now the owner wants to know if she can use it for anything like surfing or such. I told her flat out, it's crap, scrounge up a couple hunnerd dollars and you can get something 10x as good. FFS.

*cries*

[Food Lady]

I have no idea what any of that means, but I'll hug you.

[Der Cute]

celeron - castrated CPU. P3 - pentium 3, roughly released 1999. This computer was originally windows ME, so 1999 or 2000.
128mb ram - not much space to park data in. That space would be a tricycle sized one.
I could start a job (install) and do laundry and dishes before it would finish. Yeah. That slow.

[Cazzi]

Ouch! I guess that machine takes forever to boot!

Have more hugs

[Divra]

Of course you can have a hug. The world needs hugs.

*HUG*

[Pixilated]

I have no idea what any of that means, but I'll hug you.

Ditto.

[Elspeth]

*hugs* That would be painful. That era of Compaq alone makes me shudder

[RichS]

celeron - castrated CPU. P3 - pentium 3, roughly released 1999. This computer was originally windows ME, so 1999 or 2000.
128mb ram - not much space to park data in. That space would be a tricycle sized one.
I could start a job (install) and do laundry and dishes before it would finish. Yeah. That slow.

I worked on a similar desktop machine at my old tech job that needed a reinstall of XP - it was one of the old Compaq models with the white/blue front and white body with model # and specs on one side.

It only had 64MB shared RAM. Windows reported only 48MB

I finally got tired and stuck in a 256MB stick of used memory to get done with it (relatively) faster.

Even more painful, they used an upgrade version of XP on the computer. Their Windows ME-based Compaq restore disks wouldn't work during the upgrade version of XP's check of an older version of Windows, so I had to install from their restore disks before installing XP.

At least my former boss had to finish that one...

[Der Cute]

It DOES take forever to boot, the user doesn't know how to do ctrl-alt-del, for god's sakes. She wants to play solitaire on it, but booting the damn thing.
It has ONE usb port, and it's 1.1 USB. PS2 mouse, floppy drive, dvd drive, omg. She could spend 20$ and get another ram stick but the machine only recognizes 300mb ram.
I am going to tell her that if she cobbles up $150 she can get a machine 100101010x faster than this hunk of junk.
I can also do bicep curls and tricep kick backs with it and tone up my arms.
oh, plus this users isn't very good at reading. She's slow/special needs adult living in a group home, but ..I've thought to tell her playing solitaire with cards would be faster.
Oh and I forgot to ask these ladies for any kind of pay for this jobby. Over 12 hours spent.

[MDLackey]

i feel your pain

[rose_metal_nz]

Oh you poor thing! *hugs*

[AccountingDrone]

Ouch. I have a wincrap ME compaq here, and I have been considering loading it with linux and leaving it at my moms to do email, light surfing and being an mp3 jukebox. I have serious doubts it has enough ram to even run youtube. I even have an ancient CRT monitor to plug into it =) Scary that it was once actually a good machine.

[Chromatix]

And if you ran software from the appropriate era on it, it still would be a good machine.

For example, I stuck with Windows 95B (for the one machine that wasn't a Mac and didn't run Linux) for quite a while until the available drivers no longer kept up with hardware upgrades - somewhere around the time that USB became unavoidable, I think. That will run just fine in 32MB on a Pentium Classic.

[RichS]

And if you ran software from the appropriate era on it, it still would be a good machine.

Totally agree - I have an old Pentium III-based Dell that is running Win98SE that I keep as a retro games system, and it still runs great.

I know there's DOSBox and virtual machines, but there's nothing like running games on a system that it was made for.

[Der Cute]

Oh, I know, of course. No Win 98's around; it was originally Windows ME but the owner had purchased XP Pro.
I was SOOO tempted to put Linux on it and somehow add Solitaire to it. But, supposedly, the user wanted to learn computer stuff. (and since Windows is around so much..logical)
I was told: make it work with what you have.
It's weird too, because the original owner had Auto Cad stuff and an AutoCad dongle, Adobe Photoshop (in the box)..high end software for this thingy.
I just might ask Judy to bring it back and put something else on it...I dunno, since I'm not sure of her environment or her uses. (and asking doesn't work very well, she's a bit slow)

I'll just use this as a good example of what an outdated computer is (I won't tell them it would run better) - and if they spent $200 or even $300 they could get something sooo much better. *shakes head*. Uber Luddites.