Windows

A friend gave me their old Windows Pentium 4 box so I could turn it into Linux server. naturally I wanted to be sure the hardware worked so I tried booting it up. Here's what happened:

I plugged in a known good monitor that was running not 5 minutes before on a Mac and booted up the Windows box...nothing. Yellow light. So, thinking for some bizarre reason Windows didn't like that monitor I plugged in another older, smaller one and voila, it works. Only now, Windows yells at me for not having a keyboard or mouse plugged in so it's stuck at the Bios screen telling me to hit F1 on my non-existent keyboard.

Looking on the back of the box I see USB ports so I plug in a USB keyboard and mouse and after attaching them and rebooting amazingly enough I see the Windows logo as the computer boots. Until it stops short of the desktop and tells me that it's not detecting a keyboard or mouse (even though both were lit up) and that I need to plug in a serial mouse now, or shut down and plug in a PS2 keyboard and mouse.

So, digging around my archives in my garage I dig out a PS2 keyboard and mouse. I shut down the thing again, this is the third time I've rebooted it just trying to get to the desktop, hook them up and it boots to a warning screen telling me one or more drives may have errors because it wasn't shut down properly, (Apparently I didn't use the non-working mouse to go to the Start menu to choose Shutdown) and finally, I get to the windows desktop...almost. Right before the desktop appears I get a dialog window telling me that the box has detected new hardware (what? the mouse or keyboard? Nope...) the MONITOR of all things, and that for this -and I'm quoting here- "plug and play" monitor it's detected it needs to SEARCH for drivers and then happily asks me WHERE THEY ARE. Hard drive number 1? number 2? Maybe the floppy drive?

I dismiss the window by hitting cancel and finally, 1 hour later, I'm at the Windows desktop waiting for it to load Zeus knows what, until the hourglass goes away and a big window pops up telling me that my computer is now protected...and to enjoy.

Yes, I'll enjoy installing Ubuntu.