I’m not sure either. I have an old Gateway that a friend gave me a year or so back, with an on-board ATI Rage 128 chip. He was sharp enough to have kept all his discs, though, so I have everything needed for the “stock” setup. A week ago, though, his employee brought me a couple of old machines that someone from his church gave him, and he wanted to see if one could be made workable. Turns out it couldn’t be, but I salvaged a few odd pieces, a 4 port USB card, an Ethernet card, a Philips 24x CD burner and two sticks of 128 RAM, which went in the Gateway. Oh, and the burner had an “Age of Empires 2” game in the drawer.
Dangdest thing I’ve ever seen – one of the hulks had two hard drives, a 10 gig that was “dead”. Couldn’t FDISK it. The other was a 160 gig, and I put it in the working Gateway and the computer itself wouldn’t even power up! I put it in my usual machine, and it wouldn’t power up either. Absolutely dead, as if the power cord was pulled. The power supply in the old hulk had something rattling in it, which turned out to be a couple of blown capacitors. My best layman’s guess is that the power supply blew on its own, or via a lightning strike, and the hard drives absorbed the hit, and the power connections on that drive somehow got fused in reverse. (?) So don’t rule out a defective hard drive if the whole machine seems dead.
I managed to find the drivers for the two cards with not too much trouble, but it might just have easily been the opposite, some sites being cryptic. (Dell is one).
I have a couple of HP’s, running ME. The employee of my friend mentioned earlier gave me an old HP that I was lucky enough that both were shipped with the exact same software build number. Both were built in early ’01, so MAYbe I could help you with a driver or two, maybe not, depending on how much newer yours is. If you like, tell me the model number and I’ll look the specs up.
That Gateway is only a 400 mhz, and came from the factory with Windows 98 and 64 whopping megs of RAM, but now it finally has 256, so will likely use it as a Linux training ground.
I personally like ME. Over time I’ve found what works and what doesn’t, have removed all the extraneous stuff and gotten the startup list to fighting trim, and am not a major gamer, so it’s very very rare to see a blue screen. (My kind of games are old arcade ones from the late ‘70’s to early ‘80’s).
I’d be scared to open up a laptop myself. I looked over an HP one for a friend’s customer, and found the service manual for it, and the blowup diagram for changing the CD drive was enough for me. I could do it, but when it’s someone elses machine….
My old Presario 5400 is the one my video connectors bad on. I still have the disk for it. I hate to give up on it simply because it was the first one I bought. That was the one I was gonna put the HD from into the Hewett Packard and took back out. The HP will likely get Linux put in it. That's the only cure for it I can think of.