Resurrecting Dead Computer

This past weekend I purchased a dead computer (Dell Optiplex 360) for $25. It had no disk drive and an ancient video card that didn’t have an HDMI port on it’s graphics card. The previous owner said it was running Windows 95. I was hoping to harvest some parts from it, but once I looked at the motherboard I realized that the motherboard was in pretty good shape. I decided to try to rebuild it.

First, I dug up an old 500 GB disk drive and installed it, just to see if the power supply worked. It powered up without a problem. I dug up an ancient monitor that would work with the old graphics card. I even had a cable that worked with both. Had a compatible keyboard and mouse. I powered the system up again and it went into BIOS setup. I changed a bunch of settings and decided to try to install an operating system. I tried installing windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows 2000. They all died horribly. I forgot how restrictive those operating systems are. They would not recognize my hard drive as it’s capacity was far beyond what Windows was configured to allow. It would also not recognize the DVD drive. I tried using a USB drive, but it would not recognize it because it was more advanced than those versions of Windows could recognize.

I gave up on Windows and decided to try several versions of “puppy Linux”, but those were not satisfactory on any level. I tried downloading an old version of Slackware and it was partly successful. I didn’t like the idea of installing an ancient operating system that would never be updated. I downloaded a copy of Pendrive Linux and downloaded a bunch of different flavors of Linux operating systems. The first that was completely successful was Raspberry Pi Desktop. It was “OK”, but I really didn’t like it. I can use it well enough on my Raspberry Pi 5, but didn’t like it as a desktop operating system. I ended up installing Debian Linux (ver. 12) and it was a flawless installation.

Looking for other problems with the system, I found out why the DVD drive didn’t work. Some meatball tried jamming the power adapter into the drive port and broke the connector on the drive. I dug up another DVD drive and installed that. So far, so good. I also swapped out the ancient graphics with a less ancient Nvidia card that at least had an HDMI port. I had to use an Ethernet cord to install everything, and really wanted to use WiFi for internet connections. Evidently Debian has a problem with installing USB WiFi adapters. I used my local copy of DeepSeek for ideas on how to configure the adapter. It was pretty useless, but it did suggest I contact the manufacturer for a driver.

The adapter did not have it’s manufacturer on the drive, so I plugged it in another computer to see what it was. It turned out to be a Realtek adapter. I could not find what I needed on the Realtek site, so I went to GitHub and downloaded the correct driver. It installed without a problem. I also added a Bluetooth adapter which also worked like a champ. The only thing that does not work is the sound. I suspect this is another driver issue, but I hooked up a Bluetooth speaker and that works well enough.

The system takes about a minute to boot, but once it comes up, it works quite well. The system has only 4GB of memory, but the DDR memory is older than all of my spare DDR3 memory cards. It may be DDR2 or even DDR1. With the Debian operating system, it made a good swap file. I can always increase the size of the swap file if it becomes a problem.

Currently all I have used it for is watching Newsmax, YouTube, and a few games. It dosen’t buffer any more than my other four systems and seems to work flawlessly. I don’t know yet if I’m going keep it or give it away. I hesitate to give it away because I don’t want to be technical support for someone that is new to Linux. They could screw it up in a heartbeat. My other choice is to get a better monitor, mount it on a nearby wall and use it to watch TV while working on other things.

Fixing this was a lot of fun (for two days), but now I need to move on to other projects.