Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
@ DMcCunney,
In fact I believe it was BIOS limitations I was thinking of. 
Hmm, I wonder if I could upgrade the BIOS somehow...
I don't know anything about them, though. Do you? |
Google says the latest BIOS for the Dell is ME051A10.EXE, dating from April 2007. According to Dell:
Issues Fixed:
=============
1. Fix sometimes intermittent pops or stutters while playing music.
If the machine won't take a drive bigger than 120GB, I think you're stuck with it.
The question is how big an HD you actually need. If 120GB is the biggest the machine will take, that's more than adequate for a working Linux system. The biggest disk hogs will be user data, especially if you have any quantity of photos, video, or music. For that, I'd use an external HD.
As mentioned, I'd look at an SSD as an HD replacement.
The BIOS isn't upgradeable on my p2110, so I'm saddled with IDE4, and even if I was willing to spend the money, the interface would limit performance.
On my homebuilt desktop, I was triple-booting Win2K, WinXP, and Ubuntu. It's a mid-tower case, and I had multiple drives installed, courtesy of addon cards that provided additional IDE slots. (At one point years back, I had 10 HDs in the box.)
I ran into a interesting quirk. The motherboard I used for a bit had a documented limit of four IDE devices, and because of the addon IDE extender, I had more. When I booted the machine, all was well for a while, but drives had a tendency to disappear from the system while it was running. I had that happen while I was
in Ubuntu. The drive Ubuntu lived on disappeared. Ubuntu was running entirely in RAM, and I didn't even realize it had happened until updates being downloaded from Canonical were failing to apply because the file system they needed to be written to was not there.
I could only imagine what might have happened had I been in Windows and the Windows drive dropped out...
The desktop has 4GB RAM. For technical reasons, 32 bit Windows can't see/use more than 3.2GB of it. I found a freeware driver that could see the rest of the RAM and allocate it as a ramdisk, so I had a 768MB ramdisk seen as drive Z. Since I spend most time in my browser, I had Firefox set to run
from the ramdisk. Scripts copied Firefox and the profile I used to the ramdisk on boot, and saved changes back to the HD on shutdown. Sped things up a treat.
Ubuntu could see/use the whole 4GB.
_______
Dennis