New life for my XPS Gen 1 laptop

This machine has had 1 problem since I purchased it in 2004 and it ended up being the keyboard. Great machine that came with Office 2003 Small business and XP Pro and I upgraded to 2 Gb of RAM via Crucial which works very well with the 3.4 GHz Extreme CPU, heck even the ATI 9700 Mobility Video got an update with the W7 driver.


Picked up a copy of Partition Magic to segment the HDD and an unused Windows 7 32 Professional package from someone who was not going to upgrade his Vista PC with. Took about 35 minutes to load W7 32 Pro and another 10 minutes to find and download updates and drivers for my EIZO S2110W monitor and Audigy NX2 USB Sound card and it runs very well. Admittedly the WEI of 3.4 isn't up to the 6.0 my main PC gives but I'm very pleased.

That inspires me to try to go one step better, and dig my old IBM 380Z out of the closet and see if it will work. The thing that will delay that is finding the power cord, which I think if buried in a big box of cables.