Dell Inspiron 531

I bought this in 2007. I'm going to convert it into a media center PC in February 2013, swapping out the Nvidia GEFORCE 9400GT for one of these video cards with HDMI (see this for more information), and attempting to use the 9400GT in a Hackintosh. I'll also need a Blu-Ray drive.

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

Memory

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

Hard Disk

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

History

April 3, 2013

Migrated to my Hackintosh as my primary machine.

June 22, 2009

Upgraded BIOS to 1.0.13.