I dug an old Dimension 2400 (celeron 2.4, 256 ram currently) out of the closet. Just wanna get it running to have a computer for the kids to use for their flash kid websites (disney, etc). Tired of them messing with my machine...

Anyway, the HD in it is blank. Trying to install Win7 since I have some spare legit licenses. However, I'm having trouble booting anything... the Dimension is IDE only. I don't HAVE an IDE optical drive any more. So I first used a utility to put the win7 iunstaller on a bootable usb stick. The dell recognized it as a bootable option, but then hangs when you try to actually boot.

Next installed a card reader (from the internal USB headers) and put win7 on a CF card. Same thing.

I'm currently putting it on a SATA HDD and gonna try booting off that with a USB-SATA adapter.

Unfortunately, that's all I can come up with right now..

Oh, wait.. I think the computers at work have IDE optical drives. I can probably "borrow" one for the weekend... that should solve my problems.

But if you have any other ideas (in case I"m wrong and the drives at work are all SATA) let me know!

dboy, I know this is not what you're asking for, but I can't pass this post without saying it
I'd recommend putting XP on that system. Windows 7 is going to run extremely slow, if at all.
Minimum RAM requirements for Windows 7:
1GB RAM (32-bit)
2 GB RAM (64-bit)

The Dimension 2400 series takes PC2700 or PC3200. It has 2 memory slots with a max of 1GB per slot, so the max memory is 2GB. Additionally, today that Celeron processor ranks towards the low end of the low end CPU's. I think even if you were to finally install Windows 7 (after a very long installation) it will be so slow that the kids wouldn't want to use it. Throw 512MB-1GB RAM in that system, install XP and the kids will have something to play with

If you don't get an IDE optical drive you still have options to install the OS. If going with XP I would slave the hard drive in another system (or boot off a Win98SE boot floppy) and format the drive as FAT32. Then copy the i386 folder from the CD, install the drive back in the 2400, boot off a DOS boot disk and start the XP installation from the i386 folder by running winnt.exe. If you search for something like "install XP from hard drive" you'll get more instruction.

I agree w/ Alan. Go w/ XP, increase the RAM to at least 512MB (preferably 1GB).

If you want a Linux alternative, the new Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop release is really nice. I've been playing around with it in virtual machines (both VMware Workstation and Virtualbox) since its release last Sunday and have been majorly impressed with it so far - it is definitely the best Ubuntu distro released to date. It does include a flash player plugin for Firefox, BTW.

Won't cost you anything to try it, beyond the download and installation time and it should install with 256MB of memory (though I'd definitely add some more if you have it laying around).

BTW, does the machine have a WinXP COA sticker on it with a keycode? If it originally came with XP, it should have one. If so, you might be able to buy a replacement Dell XP OS reinstallation disc for it (either on eBay or from a reseller) pretty cheap.

If all you want is to run a web browser & flash, then I think this is a great way to go. I'd recommend using Chrome for the speed boost & sandboxing though.
If you do have an XP COA, you can even download a Dell reinstall image & burn it, or I'm sure somebody here has an extra one that they could send your way.

For that matter, I've had great luck using *any* Dell Windows reinstall disk (XP Home, XP Pro, Vista) on any old Dell machine, regardless of what version of the OS it originally had installed (even ones that came with WinME <shudder>).

Thanks - I think I'll try putting both Win7 and XP on it to compare (I've got a win home server, so once I get one installed, I back it up and can reimage in no time). I was planning to do 7 just so all the machines in the house have the same OS, but it may be painful, I know. The kids are only 4 and 6 though, so they don't care TOO much.

I did get an IDE dvd drive out of a machine here at work, so I'll be able to install anything. Weekend Project time

So, how did the weekend project go? Did the Windows 7 installation complete yet? (sorry, couldn't resist)

ended up going w/ XP. Didn't bother with 7.

Found a 256mb stick of DDR at a local microcenter for a couple bucks, so grabbed that since I don't have any ddr anymore. Turned out to actually be ECC REG DDR, so it wouldn't boot. Returned it and got another stick that's plain ddr, but haven't tried it yet.