Dell T105 XP

Amazingly you can buy a fast PC for only £99 from Dell. The problem is that it is a server intended for business use: the T105. I thought I'd reuse one of my old XP licenses and install it one one of these babies. In the end I paid about £240 for an increased spec.

Now the problems: you have to buy it without any OS and then try to install XP and all the drivers yourself this page gave me all the info I needed.

1. Create an XP installation disc with SP3 on it and the SATA drivers using nLite . The drivers were from here for the R165652. Select 'Textmode' and not 'PNP' when it comes to a choice.
2. Install XP from this disc
3. Get the network driver (for a server) (Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet driver), Graphics driver (ATI RN50 (ES1000) graphics driver) and mainboard drivers (nVidia nForce Professional (2200 MCP) mainboard drivers)
4. Install them.

The mainboard and graphics drivers have executables to install the drivers, but to install the Broadcom network drivers I needed to

1. Control Panel/Add new hardware
2. Yes I have connected hardware
3. Select network driver that has not been installed
4. Follow nose to install the driver files

I need to get a USB keyboard and mouse, and I'll buy myself a cheap audio card. I might even invest in a better graphics card. Anyway I think I'm going to be really happy with my purchase.

Update: No Standby Mode.

The motherboard can't enter standby mode. This is a bit annoying because I wanted to use it to connect to the Internet when any other PC in the house wanted to access it. The network device can perform a 'wake on lan' operation to a motherboard in standby mode, to wake it up. Obviously I can't do this now.

I've decided not to get a graphics card yet. Not having one will reduce my power consumption. I'll get one if I need it though.

Update 2008-09-23: USB sound

I've bought a tiny little USB sound 'card' which just has a stereo line in & out sockets from eBay for a couple of quid. I expected the sound quality to be awful, but actually it's alright. I've only got entry level speakers and there's no detectable quality issue with it.

I did try to get a PCI sound card, but the board is 3.3V and all of the cheap sound cards seem to be 5V. Equally all PCI-Express sound cards are expensive.