So I acquired this desktop from a friend. Looking at the outside, it at least had usb ports, so it couldn't be that old. Popping the hood (man, was it dusty inside - I'll bet whoever owned it never took the cover off and vacuumed it) I saw a modern heatsink/fan combo, so that gave me encouragement.

Powered it up. It turns out it's a Gigabyte mobo, with a 1 GHz Duron cpu, and everything seemed OK. This would make a nice backup/internet computer. Now let's see what the OS is.

The splash screen came up, and it was loaded with XP Pro. Great! Lots of possibilities with that in there.

Once it started, I brought up the system information pane. Now, I'm used to seeing XP with Service Pack 3, or at least SP2. I do recall seeing one or two computers with SP1.

This one was SP Nothing. That's right - no Service Pack had ever been applied to this machine.

As I stepped back to look further, I noticed thare was no on-board RJ-45 connector, and no NIC. All it had was a modem.

Apparently, whoever owned it had just set it up years ago, used dialup for maybe email, and played a couple of games. I think I have the computer owned by the proverbial little old lady in tennis shoes.