Old Fujitsu Celcius 440 P3 box, is there anything I can do with this?

[herojig]

My pal brought a Fujitsu Celcius 440 P3 box in to the studio today, and asked me if I could get it working for him. He's a dog trainer living in Nepal on less then a few hundred dollars a month. I'm a mac guy, but I remember working on these types of machines decades ago, when NT 4.0 was all the rage in the business world. Well, it's all working it seems, hardware wise, but with only 128 meg of ram. The harddrive does not have a recognized OS, so the first thing to do is to fix that.

My question to the plenary is this: what will run on this? I was thinking maybe Ubuntu, but the specs say it needs 384 ram to install. Is there a chance for Win7? I think it may be very hard to get another ram stick, as I doubt any one here stocks 300Mhz RDRAM.

Ideas? I wanted to suggest to my pal that perhaps a new motherboard and P4, with new ram might work, but I know he can't afford that...and it seems it would be cheaper/easier to get an atom knatbook for about the same price. All he wants to do with it is to connect to the internet and watch DVDs.

Well, thx!!!
jigs

 

[ulysses35]

Hmm are you sure about the memory speed ? didnt think Fujitsu built any machines using RDRAM.

We have several Fujitsu's at work and the oldest one uses PC100 / PC133 RAM which can be easily had for £8.00 for 256mb.

Word of warning though they are very very fussy about which brand of RAM they will work with

 

[ulysses35]

If it is a case of PC100/Pc133 RAM let me know I have boxes of spare RAM...

 

[herojig]

thx for the offer ulyssess!!! the ram that is in there is marked like this: samsung korea 00009 128mb / 8 ecc, KMMR18R88AC1-RK7711-45 100, FQV PN 33L3095, 128MB ECC, RAMBUS RIMM - so not sure what the heck it is... the spec sheet on this box says max. 512 RDRAM, ECC / 2 RIMM slots.

Anyway, I tried to load latest Ubunto, but the CD locks up during the install. I did manage to format the drive using a BartPE disk, so that part's looking good. Wondering now if NTFS and Ubunto are incompatible...never seen it in the wild

Anyway, assuming I can get an OS loaded, I guess the next challenge would be to find drivers for this thing...perhaps you have those for some OS? The one's needed would be sound and built-in NIC.

Cheers!

 

[herojig]

UPDATE: Well, I have XP loaded on this device with just the 128mb, and all seems to work (all the drivers seemed to be there and working) BUT the one reason I am trying to get this box working is to provide my pal with something he can watch DVDs on (as he has no TV). I loaded latest VLC player on the box thinking this was the "lightest" DVD decoder out there that was free, but while Audio is fine, the Video does not seem to be able to keep up. It's just a choppy mess.

So I am wondering if a P3 800 with 128 ram can play a DVD or not? The player seems to be reasonably new, and must be at least an 8x player. So wondering what could be the problem? The display card/driver? QT movies play, albeit the startup is slow...so at least h.264 works, and everything in Safari works great. Wonder where to start?!? thx!!!
jigs

 

[herojig]

UPDATE #2: found a stick of RDRAM at a junk PC parts store here in Kathmandu (a miracle, and it works) so I now have 256+128 and it works great. BUT the only thing is the jerky DVD playback. I've tried everything (cables, DVD player, DMA settings, BIOS update, IDE drivers, the whole shebang, to no avail). So now I am thinking it must be the SIS 6326 AGP card with only 4MB that's holding up the show. Now what to do? Arg...