Recycling Part 2 : Pentium 3 and a dodgy motherboard

My uncle dropped by yesterday and got a 10 year old relic of a PC he'd come across somewhere, to see if I can make it work. It's a lot older than my first PC

I'd previously written about salvaging useful parts from Computers for use elsewhere, but it turns out it's not as easy as it may seem. There's just nothing you can do with a floppy drive now!

A few pictures below:

Intel 815 Motherboard and a Pentium 3 800 Mhz under the hood

I remember this one from School. Unreliable and prone to malfunction

The processor sitting under a thick coat of dust. 40mm fan was enough then!

My trusty old Jackly screw driver kit made dismantling a breeze

Every component from the capacitors to PCI slots were covered in thick dust

128x2 of SD RAM running at 133 Mhz

40mm brushless Intel fan

It took a hard brush and a jet of water under the sink to wash away the dust

The heart, a Pentium 3 Socket 478 processor. 

Clock speed: 800 Mhz.   We have 1 Ghz phones these days...  

Relic of the past... the 1.44 Floppy drive

It took some real blowing and scrubbing to clean the cabinet

I tried installing a copy of Windows xp but the system just won't boot from CD, no matter how much I tweak the boot options. I even tried a few Linux distros...no luck.

Will update this post once I get it working. Or it's the garbage bin or free distribution(via erodov) for this one!