Back in January of 2001, I bought a state of the art computer. It was the Dell Dimension 8100. I was immensely proud of it. It had 256 megs of RAM (which was unheard of at the time), a 250 Gig Hard Drive, 1.3 mhz processor and all the bells and whistles one cold have hoped for in 2001 of a computer. I bought it thinking this computer would probably be my last since they won't be able to improve on this computer. Of course, I was completely wrong on that. I have bought 2 other desktop computers since that one and one laptop as well. For a long time, I placed this computer out in my storage shed amongst the heat and humidity of the Gulf Coast of the USA. I was thinking it's usefulness days were over. This was three years ago. I decided I needed an old computer for a server with my wireless printing I was going to be doing. So, I decided to retrieve the old Dell Dimension 8100 from the storage shed.

I was thinking it would not even boot up. Surely, the power supply was zapped after three years. As it turns out, I was right. I got on ebay to see if I could possibly buy a cheap power supply for this old computer. I didn't expect to even be able to find one on a computer that is over ten years old. Well, there were dozens of power supplies for this old Dell Dimension 8100. I found one that was $24.99 plus shipping and handling of $4.95. I thought $30 was about right. I got the power supply within three days. I took out the old power supply, put in the rebuilt power supply and pressed the power on button. It booted up to the setup screen. I just went to the default settings and then the computer booted right up to Windows XP (which came with Windows ME originally). I was amazed. But, that amazement was short lived. The system fan was not working and heat was building up quickly inside the computer. So, back to ebay again and bought one for less than $10 including shipping.

So, I got that fan back in about three days also. Put it in and the Dell Dimension 8100 is running like a charm. I am impressed. I really thought about giving it to a school before I put it in the storage shed. But, most schools will not take a computer that is over five years old. So, this ancient, but still viable computer is still running, doing its job like the day it was born at a Dell manufacturing plant over ten years ago. Dell doesn't make computers as reliable as this old Dell Dimension 8100 any longer. They have dropped below HP insofar as most popular brand of computer. But, ten years ago, Dell couldn't keep up with demand. That old Dell Dimension 8100 is still paying dividends for the price I paid so long ago.

I started to name this blog entry "The Computer That Wouldn't Die." But, I feel that is too generic and an affront to an old reliable Dell computer. I plan on keeping it as long as I can get parts now. Hopefully, people on eBay will continue to sell parts for this old Dell Dimension 8100.





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