Category: 
First one was a vintage PC he got off of me years ago, a P3 with 256Mb of RAM. I took my ‘kit’ of install and software disks along with me, and after discovering that we were trying to boot off of a DVD by using a CD drive, decided to go with a ‘tweaked’ Windows Server 2003 install.
The installation went through fine, however the hardware detection didn’t find drivers for the wireless PCI card that was in the machine, nor the on-board sound. The wireless card was an easy fix – since the model number was clearly displayed on the card and a quick Google search found the drivers on the manufacturers site. Interestingly enough, there were no 2003 drivers, but on installing the XP drivers, found that they worked perfectly. The sound drivers are still a work in progress though.
The second PC for rebuilding was a P4 with 1Gb RAM. This machine was in a small form factor case (cube shape) and the CPU fan sounded something like a helicopter preparing to take off (as the load on the CPU changed, the speed and therefore the tone of the fan changed as well).
This machine was already a dual-boot system, between XP and an Apple OS-X install that was modified to run on a non-Apple Intel machine. It also had a 3rd party boot loader (GAG Bootloader) that had passed its trial period, and after selecting your OS of choice would wait about 2 minutes before proceeding to boot.
After removing the boot loader, I booted up off of a Vista install disc. At the point where the destination drive and partition are selected, I found that there were 4 partitions – 1 for the existing XP partition, and 3 for the OS-X system. I removed the 3 OS-X ones, created a new partition in the newly freed space, and proceeded with the Vista install.
On this machine, I was a little surprised at how quickly Vista installed. I was also surprised at the fact it created a boot menu, allowing the old XP partition to be booted as well – I’ve read a lot of articles that recommend Vista should be installed before XP on a dual-boot system.
After Vista had finished installing, and before I allowed it to connect to the internet and start downloading updates, I installed SP-1 which Microsoft released last week. This took about 40 minutes to install – which is sort of understandable, seeing that its basically installing every windows update since Vista was originally released.
Third on the list of installs was a MacBook. My friend had suffered a familiar fate to myself where his hard drive had died. He had purchased and installed a new larger one, and needed OS-X re-installed. He’d also bought himself a new copy of Leopard for the machine, as it had previously had Panther.
Installation of OX-X is basically a hands-free install – basically point it at the drive and sit back and relax. Then of course, once its finished, theres the updates. Then, after that, the updates to the updates. When thats all done, there are a couple of updates to finish it off…
So, at the end of the afternoon, 3 PCs rebuilt, all working well except for some sound drivers! A job well done I think! 