Is there hope for this Dell?

[DougyDanger]

My sister has a Dell Dimension XPS T450. It was new in '99. She is having trouble with it crashing and illegal operation errors (yes, reinstalled windows). She would like to upgrade to XP, but Dell says she can't with that hardware. Is that true? I've done some poking around and found people with similar machines that Dell said "NO" to have done it.

Altertatively can I replace the MB/Processor to try and get it running faster/better? This is probably more trouble than its worth considering what you can get a new one for with coupons and sales.

 

[LeetestUnleet]

Okay, I installed XP on a machine with the following specs:

P2 300mhz
64MB PC66 RAM
4GB SCSI HD
8MB non-3D Matrox Millenium 2 AGP

It ran incredibly sluggish, but it ran. I'm sure the Dell has better specs than that, so I say go for it. Out of curiousity, what version of Windows is she trying to run that's giving her errors?

As a note, I paid $232 shipped for my recent upgrade to:
Asus A7N8X Deluxe rev2.0 (refurb)
AMD Athlon XP Barton 2500+
512MB Mushkin PC3200 RAM
Prices may have fluctuated a little, but that's Newegg prices. If you've got that kind of dough to spend on upgrading her machine, it may be worth it (depending on what she uses it for)

 

[Abhi]

I ran it on a P2 300, With 128mb RAM

It had 2 MB VRAM..

It was... not that bad actually ... runnable...

Just make sure u have 128 mb ram....

 

[boran]

ram's the ticker. try to get it up to 256 and you're home free.

 

[johnjkr1]

Having worked at Dell, I can tell you that most of their tech support is horrible, especially now with everything outsourced. As far as XP goes, it should run fine on that machine...hardware wouldnt be the issue, but if she needed support with it Dell couldnt help if she put XP on it.

As far as motherboard swaps go, its really not possible, Dell's use a proprietary power supply, so a standard ATX board would just get fried. There are some processor upgrade options though. And if she reinstalled and is still having crashes, XP probably wont solve her problem. She might just have one of those "special" dell hard drives that started dying after a couple of years.

 

[amdskip]

Sounds like she has windows me. If so, that is the cause of all of her problems. Dump it ASAP and shatter the cd. I can't stand that operating system.

 

[LeetestUnleet]

Dell power supplies are in fact proprietary, but they won't necessarily fry anything. I've tried it, before I knew Dell's were proprietary, and it simply didn't boot - nothing fried. I plugged in another proprietary power supply and everything worked just fine. BUT that's getting OT.

Is the machine still under warranty? I would request a new hard drive if what johnjkr1 said is true, but it sounds to me like the RAM might be going haywire on you. Swap the RAM out with known-good stuff and see if it still crashes.

If it *IS* Windows ME, yes, dump it QUICK. That OS is the most poorly made. All it is is mainly Win98 ported to the Win2k kernel, and there are some big compatibility issues. Go with either 2k or XP IMO. I have a WinME CD for no reason other than I like to collect old software (I have AOL ver 1.0 too!). I've got all (legit) versions of Windows from 3.0 on up, server and non for the applicable ones. Still working on getting Server 2003 though. Go MSDN Academic Alliance!

 

[boran]

Originally posted by: LeetestUnleet
[...] If it *IS* Windows ME, yes, dump it QUICK. That OS is the most poorly made. All it is is mainly Win98 ported to the Win2k kernel, and there are some big compatibility issues. Go with either 2k or XP IMO. I have a WinME CD for no reason other than I like to collect old software (I have AOL ver 1.0 too!). I've got all (legit) versions of Windows from 3.0 on up, server and non for the applicable ones. Still working on getting Server 2003 though. Go MSDN Academic Alliance!

fyi nothing win2K-ish is involved, they just gutted the dos out of it a bit more, installed extra bloat and called it a new OS.

 

[LeetestUnleet]

Originally posted by: boran

Originally posted by: LeetestUnleet
[...] If it *IS* Windows ME, yes, dump it QUICK. That OS is the most poorly made. All it is is mainly Win98 ported to the Win2k kernel, and there are some big compatibility issues. Go with either 2k or XP IMO. I have a WinME CD for no reason other than I like to collect old software (I have AOL ver 1.0 too!). I've got all (legit) versions of Windows from 3.0 on up, server and non for the applicable ones. Still working on getting Server 2003 though. Go MSDN Academic Alliance!

fyi nothing win2K-ish is involved, they just gutted the dos out of it a bit more, installed extra bloat and called it a new OS.

Whatever ME is crap and that's all I care about What I meant to say (I was in a hurry before) was that they were attempting to market it as the home-end version of Windows 2000 for cheaper folk who wanted 9x-esque compatibility (2k was having issues with some games and game-related hardware at the time performance-wise) but the supposed "stability" of 2k.