osprey.retro

Mildred

Mildred was an interesting find. Definitely not my first foray into older hardware but definitely my favorite so far. I spotted her on eBay for pretty cheap, and what caught my eye about her was that she came with:

• Windows Vista;
• a fucking floppy drive;
• a Linksys Wireless-G card; and
• a 52K Modem card.

Such a fascinating combination of hardware I could not turn down, so I made what turned out to be a questionable but fun impulse purchase.

When I got it, it was a little banged up, but not badly enough to warrant acting on it. I tried to power it on, and while the lights came on for a second, the power supply soon failed (fortunately, not in a kaboom way).

I replaced it with the exact same supply rather than a modern one, both because having period-accurate parts was a big goal for me at the time (more on that in a bit) and because it was really cheap on eBay. I waited a few excruciatingly long days (you know how it is), installed it, and it booted up just fine.

Not only, however, was the factory Dell OEM install of Windows Vista still present on the machine, but the previous owner's data was still on it, untouched. Curious, I poked around a bit and quickly found not only viruses (worry not, I did not hook it up to my network until after a full wipe) but low-quality screencaps of pornography. Yikes.

After being my indecisive self and installing several OSes, I opted to dual-boot 32-Bit Windows XP and 64-Bit Windows Vista. I mostly use the former, as Mildred is hooked into my server on the ethernet port forwarded to my CGHMN router VM, and it feels more era-appropriate. Also, I think I broke the Vista install trying to get extended kernel working lol.

Model	Dell Dimension E521
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 X2
GPU	AMD Radeon R7 250
RAM	4x1GB DDR2 800MHz
OS	Windows XP/Vista (Dual-Boot)
Photos	Coming Soon!

Linda

WIP

Model	17" Apple iMac 5,1 (Late 2006)
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo T7400
GPU	ATI Radeon X1600
RAM	3GB DDR2 ???MHz
OS	Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)
Photos	Coming Soon!