COVID-19 home office
By Doulgas Wu

Finally, I have a fully functioning home office equipped with an employer-supplied laptop and vintage personal computer plus printer.

Now, I work from home in style in my new home office.

It wasn't easy.

First, I purchased the wrong memory chips for the year 2000 Dell Dimension XPS T-450 PIII.

The personal computer came with 64 megabytes onboard RAM. The intent was to add another 128 megabytes of RAM to bring total system memory to 192 megabytes.

Unfortunately, I purchased the wrong 128 megabyte RAM for the kind of motherboard in the old Dell. I had to search through eBay again for the correct RAM chips.

When it came time to redo the hard drive, I realized I had forgot all about the licenses needed during the reinstall process.

I had to tear through my closets to find the licenses for Windows NT 4.0 and Office 2000 that came with the Dell when it was new.

My bad habit of never throwing anything away paid off for once in my life.

Nothing happened as expected when I tried to boot the old Dell from the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM. I knew right away the first sector of the CD-ROM disk is not the boot sector.

A Google search indicted what I needed to bring the old Dell to the point where I could reload its operating system from CD-ROM is the rescue disk (3.5 inch floppy boot disk).

Thankfully, I remembered I had created a rescue disk when I first fired up the Dell when it was brand new per instruction in the start-up guide/manual.

My bad habit of never throwing anything away paid off for the second time in my life.

Very quickly I was able to boot the old Dell from the rescue disk and reintall Windows NT 4.0 and Office 2000.

I think my next project will be to search eBay for old computer games compatible with the old Dell.

I need something to do on my breaks from work in my new home office.