pharaoh (Dell Wyse Z90DE7 thin client)

I got this unit on ebay. It came wiped (no embedded Win 7 install), and the BIOS supervisor password already disabled. This one has the extra legacy ports and 802.11n WiFi card.

Even though the PCIe slot wasn't occupied I was happy to find the internal port breakout board was still installed.

I stripped the head on the SATA DOM module. Can't even budge it with pliers grabbing the head so I guess I'll drill it out and hope.

The only other thing of note was the serial/PS/2 breakout board cable had become unplugged.

I decided to make an XP machine (another one).

First I put a couple SSDs in. One using an M.2 in SATA DOM-like module, and the other I borrowed the one from rising.

After surveying my available wifi cards I decided to stick with the included Atheros AR5BHB116. My others were either draft-N (Intel 5100), or 802.11 abg only (AR5BXB6).

I left the PCI-E slot open for now, but I might steal the graphics card from intruder, or something else from the pile.

I thought it was straightforward to put some AMD AHCI SATA drivers on a floppy, and have the XP installer load them, but that didn't work out. XP would see them, load them, then when it went to actually load the driver it would pretend it couldn't find it. After several iterations I finally gave up and built a slipstreamed install image.

I followed Fernando's [Guide] Integration of AMD’s AHCI/RAID drivers into a WinXP/W2k3 CD to build an nLite iso and burn it. The driver I used was the (b) option "For AHCI users with an old SB7xx or SB8xx AMD system" on account of the AMD driver bundles having a folder called 'SB7xx'.

Anyhow, Windows got installed. I use the previous 9.00 Catalyst driver package to get some more hardware working.

Now what's left is the audio, ethernet, wifi, and a USB 3.0 controller.

The audio chip is Realtek ALC269. Realtek still distributes a XP driver version R2.74 from 2018. Works a treat. The Ethernet is much the same with Realtek packing all the fast and gigabit ethernet XP drivers together. I got the Atheros wifi driver from questionable site ath-drivers.eu (because it was mentioned on wikidevi). Finally the Renesus USB 3.0 driver can be gotten from Dell. If in doubt check the device id in device manager, and search for that.

I tried upgrading the AMD Catalyst driver to 9.00.100.9001, but blue screens started happening with KERNEL​_DATA​_INPAGE​_ERROR.

Now that most of the issues with installing XP were done I decided to start fresh.

• Install XP again (still using the nLite image with Fernando's SB7xx driver)
• Run a Memtest (should be first, but I went out of order)
• Install the latest drivers
• Hope

The final driver set I'm going to go with is:

• Realtek High Definition Audio Codec (R2.74)
• Realtek PCIe GBE Ethernet (5.836)
• Renesas USB 3.0 Host Controller Driver (R305958)
• Atheros AR5B116 (10.0.0.274)
• AMD Embedded GPU and APU XP Driver (Version 9.00.100.9001 / Catalyst 12.9)

Most things went well. Four passes of memtest. The Catalyst installer somehow failed to install .NET so it couldn't actually run it's GUI. I moved on to installing the unofficial XP service pack 4, and another blue screen hit.

On a third boot I got a unique blue screen I've not seen before. It says

STOP: d0000144 Unknown Hard Error
Unknown Hard Error

After a lot of trouble I decided to try a Windows 7 install to rule out weird driver issues. During the install I kept having weird drive issues like disks disappearing, and the installer refused to use the primary disk even when it could see it.

Eventually I gave up and swapped the Lite-On CV3-SD256 M.2 drive out, but I only had a 16GB replacement in this 2242 size. It became the OS drive, and the 2.5" Samsung SSD will hold most games, and large software. I went back to XP, and this time I was able to get a complete working install.

After the install I did some progressive driver testing. I started with XP Service Pack 4 Unofficial. Then I installed a driver, rebooted, and let it run for a while before moving to the next. The AMD graphics driver was last.

With a stable install I got to work installing lots of games. I was using the primary disk as a staging area. I think I messed it up a bit because XP has no trim support, and I'm not sure these little 16GB SSDs support trim at all. The machine feels a bit bogged down.

For installs I either used ISOs on a network share with PortableWinCDEmu. This was a really convenient way to do it. The other method was mostly GOG installers, but they required staging (copying to a local drive) because executables can't be run from the network share.

Many installs and tests later I have a bunch of games. I ran into a few things that should be able to run on XP, but wouldn't. Some could be fixed by substituting a DLL, but others I didn't find a solution. The big ones I remember were Arx Fatalis (even Arx Libertatis wouldn't run), and Half-Life 2 which I tried to make run without Steam, but my CD copy seemed to differ from the instructions I found.

I also had trouble with some smaller titles like Hacknet, and Shenzhen IO. The Radeon 6320 tended to have artifacts in Unreal engine games running DirectX, but it seemed to work fine with OpenGL.

Overall performance felt pretty reasonable. I mostly did tests at 1920x1200 where possible. Things like Fallout 3 struggled to maintain reasonable FPS (15-20 with no action) so it's not up to that resolution. I think at 720p I can probably run most of the games from that era with medium settings.

I looked again at graphics cards and I'm unsure about adding one. I think most cards that improve on the 6320 are going to require too much power.

What's left to do:

• I got a 5V blower that I might install on the internal USB header if it fits, and is quiet enough. The heatsink in these guys gets pretty toasty even though it is built to be passive.
• I need to pull both SSDs and put them in a modern OS to see if I can TRIM them.
• Need to get out an IO slot cover since I don't have a card to put in.
• I don't need the extra storage at the moment, but it might be nice to get a PCIE SATA controller with onboard M.2 or MSATA.