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New Dell: interesting box
Sep. 2nd, 2007 01:08 amPretty nice looking case, a combo of silver and white that looks nice to me.
This is as "legacy free" as I've ever gotten.
No parallel or serial ports, no PS/2 mouse or keyboard ports, or PATA.
You get integrated VGA, sound, and a truckload (10) of USB 2.0 ports. 4 front, 4 rear, 2 internal (used for memory card reader or whatever).
Inside, 2 PCI, 1 PCI Express 1x and 1 PCI Express 16x slot. The free fax modem is in a PCI slot. 4 SATA sockets, with 2 taken up (first HD and the optical drive). Network/external storage looks good for this machine.
The lack of PATA sockets will probably mean using the 2nd PCI slot for PATA support.
The 2nd machine that's coming I ordered with firewire; the chat line dude said it was mainboard integrated and the $30 was just buying a cable; however, I looked over this mainboard and didn't see a socket. I'm thinking when it shows up it'll have a firewire card in a slot. Hopefully it's the PCIX 1x slot so the 2 PCIs are free.
I immediately wiped Vista (ptooey) from the machine, and I'm in the process of trying to get XP up and running on it. I have 2000 too but I have a Dell XP OEM disc that should work. Dell doesn't disclose or provide drivers for anything but Vista (apparently they're contractually bound by Microsoft to not help with installing anything but Vista) but a tiny bit of googling turned up the chipset and links to drivers, so hopefully this won't take too long.
This is as "legacy free" as I've ever gotten.
No parallel or serial ports, no PS/2 mouse or keyboard ports, or PATA.
You get integrated VGA, sound, and a truckload (10) of USB 2.0 ports. 4 front, 4 rear, 2 internal (used for memory card reader or whatever).
Inside, 2 PCI, 1 PCI Express 1x and 1 PCI Express 16x slot. The free fax modem is in a PCI slot. 4 SATA sockets, with 2 taken up (first HD and the optical drive). Network/external storage looks good for this machine.
The lack of PATA sockets will probably mean using the 2nd PCI slot for PATA support.
The 2nd machine that's coming I ordered with firewire; the chat line dude said it was mainboard integrated and the $30 was just buying a cable; however, I looked over this mainboard and didn't see a socket. I'm thinking when it shows up it'll have a firewire card in a slot. Hopefully it's the PCIX 1x slot so the 2 PCIs are free.
I immediately wiped Vista (ptooey) from the machine, and I'm in the process of trying to get XP up and running on it. I have 2000 too but I have a Dell XP OEM disc that should work. Dell doesn't disclose or provide drivers for anything but Vista (apparently they're contractually bound by Microsoft to not help with installing anything but Vista) but a tiny bit of googling turned up the chipset and links to drivers, so hopefully this won't take too long.
