Windows 2000

Like a kid with a new toy, I just couldn't leave the desktop computer alone, with it's virgin hard drive and greater ram and clock speed than the Sony.

With boot up I realized that there was no media in the CD-Rom which leads me to believe that those beeps I heard in the morning were from the system going from floppy.. to media... to hard drive and finding nothing bootable. Once I pushed in the Windows98 recovery floppy (it was there and I was feeling lazy) it booted up with no problems.

Time to install Windows2000.

Booting up with the CD in the drive, everything looked fine until it tried to scan the hard drive and found none! None?!? It showed up in the bios when in the listing for Primary and Secondary Master/Slave as a Primary master.

Then I noticed that the Primary master was set as CD-Rom from when I was having problems getting the system to boot the first time. Changing it back and retrying it, the process detected the hard drive without any problems. Then comes up to the Partition options.

I wanted to set aside 20GB for Windows and the other 60GB for the Linux and files.

I was able to select the whole disk, but it did not let me change how big it was in any way. I tried a couple times thinking maybe it is the keyboard, but everything else with the keyboard worked so that wasn't the culprit.

Deciding to let the Linux distro fix the partitions since Linux is usually more friendly about sharing a PC with another OS (unlike self-centered Windows!).

I let it convert the entire 80GB hard drive to NTFS and install Windows2000 Professional. Everything went very smooth and straight forward. It actually took less time than I expected but family duties kept me from knowing exactly when it was complete.

So Windows2000 is up and running ... mostly. Seems the drivers need to be updated/installed:

• Video doesn't go further than 800x600 and 16 bit colors
  ATI 32MB Radeon


• Nothing is coming out of the sound
  ADI 198X Integrated Audio?


• Modem seems to be stuck in "on"
  I do have another one I'm gonig to swap out

I am looking at Dell's site to see about downloading the drivers in hopes that this works.

The system does read my USB flash drive so I have been able to download from the Sony, put it on the USB drive, switch it over to the Dell and install.

My goal here is to get the Dell running a relatively basic system. I want Windows2000 to be able to work from home (handy with Connecticut winters). I am thinking about getting a laptop in the near future (this year or next) for the "adults", at which point that becomes my primary remote-working system

Espeically if I get it wirelessly hooked up so I can work in the bathroom (hey! how many of YOU do your best thinking in the bathroom?!)