Mike Dragon

Check out what I am playing with, right now:

So, context: I got bored.

But seriously... besides feeling a little bored, I have a few motherboard and processors stored in a box and I've been wanting to test them out for a long while. These are parts that were either defective or just too old to still be used for work. These belonged to some of my clients and were discarded for those reasons I just mentioned and I've been hoarding them. Like I said, some of this stuff (I'm talking about the motherboards, now) work like new so throw them away would be a waste. On top of that, I've been wanting to toy around with a Pentium 4 system and Windows 2000 for a while (I also really want to actually build a high-end Pentium III system for myself) so upon finding this Gigabyte GA-VM800PMC motherboard in a box in apparently mint condition, I decided to take it out and test it.

After looking it up online to learn about its specs, processor and RAM support, I sourced a Pentium 4 SL96H clocked at 3.60GHz and a 2GB DDR2 RAM stick from my stashes and put them on the board. Thankfully I also had a Pentium 4 cooler somewhere so I used that. After some cleaning of the RAM, the board beeped, indicating that it, the processor and RAM are alive!  I also have a couple IDE hard drives as well as a IDE DVD drive lying around that I've been meaning to test for a long time, so I figured this would also be the perfect opportunity to test them out, so I hooked them up to the motherboard. Since this board supports Windows 2000, I am using that.  :3 Though I think the hard drive I chose for this test (A 250GB Samsung) is defective. It's making a few odd noises and Windows is taking an awful long time to install.  Well, whatever. I am testing, after all! I'm not done yet, though. Still got some fun ahead of me with this system. :3

I still want a Pentium III IBM Thinkpad, designed for Windows 2000, though.

UPDATE: The hard drive is indeed defective. Got slower and slower until errors finally popped up. The drive was literally burning hot! lol Put in a 40 GB one to find out if that one is also defective or not. I should buy myself a IDE-compatible dock station for testing these drives.