Dell Inspiron 531

I bought this in 2007. I'm going to convert it into a media center PC in May 2013. Current specs:

• Primary OS is Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope
• Runs Windows Vista virtualized using VirtualBox
• Media file server served via NFS and VirtualBox Shared Folders

Memory

4GB RAM.

PC2-4200/5300/6400 DDR2 SDRAM DIMMs. This site recommends maximizing the memory in each bank. Also see this site.

Hard Disk

Two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drives conigured as RAID1 using Linux Software RAID.

The default max capacity was two 500GB drives. Upgrading BIOS to 1.0.13 (suggested by this piece) boosted the capacity. I now have two 1TB drives in there.

Video

EVGA GEFORCE 8400GS 1GB. Replaced a Nvidia GEFORCE 9400GT, which now resides in my Hackintosh. Used this post as a guide to help determine which video card to get.

History

April 3, 2013

Migrated to my Hackintosh as my primary machine. Swapped out my video card and my DVD-RW for a Blu-Ray drive.

June 22, 2009

Upgraded BIOS to 1.0.13.