2006-01-18 Gateway all-in-one

OK, picked up a Gateway Profile 400Mhz with 128M RAM, like this one. Booted fine into Windows 98, seems to work. Booted knoppix DVD on it and it seems to have trouble, optical drive trouble. Tried different knoppix CD, no improvement.

Parts are standard laptop stuff so I grabbed a DVDrom from a toshiba laptop, stripped off the toshiba mounts and IDE connection shim, and put the gateway stuff on it. Plonked it in and knoppix booted OK. Upon showing my achievement to a colleague, he grabbed the corner of the still dismantled machine and it went dead. Hmmm. No light, no bios, nothing. At this point I personally declared success because I had fixed what was initially wrong with the thing, but I suspected a warped motherboard had now killed the machine. For some reason he dismantled further. Getting close to fundamentals he tried a last test boot and it worked, hence we remantled piece by piece test booting as we went. Eventually was fully working and all together, change knoppix CD yet again to avoid a big piece of bitrot we dicovered and it works great.

Phew. Now, on the HD was a pile of word docs (homework assigment type stuff) , some porn movies, some music, Napster, Kazaa etc etc. Usual stuff, here are the top 20 domains previous owner got cookies from:

    138 sextracker
     88 go
     83 hitbox
     51 yahoo
     28 aol
     27 advertising
     26 sportsline
     25 co
     24 msn
     22 nj
     22 att
     18 weather
     18 porncity
     17 cnn
     15 gator
     14 porntrack
     13 villanova
     13 lycos
     12 mediaplex
     12 fastclick

Nicely representative I would think. This machine will become some kind of installed art at the hands of the Z dudes or something as it is quite a handy form factor for that.