The home NAS project has kinda stalled, although I’ve been collecting bits for it still. But I had a weekend experience I thought I’d share with my readers.

Sometime in 2004 or 2005 I purchased a Dell Inspiron E1405 (Core Duo, DVD burner, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005). I ran it, occasionally updated, from then until probably 2008 when I got my D830. It then went into storage, and somewhere in the past six years I lost the install media.

Late last month, a friend wanted me to help her fix her dad’s Thinkpad 600e. Nice machine, but somewhat anachronistic (and is it really worth fixing a Pentium II with 64MB of RAM?). I found the E1405 and figured I’d pass it along… but since it had Media Center Edition and not Home or Pro, I had no media handy (and Microsoft’s Action Pack only includes current products, not historical ones).

I did a bit of web searching, expecting I’d have to pay $25 to an eBay seller as I’ve done before once or twice (mostly for Thinkpad recovery media). Found Dell’s replacement disk page, put in a request with my serial number, and sent it off.

I didn’t really expect a response, but I got a personal confirmation that the discs were being shipped, and a couple of automated updates. Today the discs arrived via Fedex standard overnight. They even included what appears to be the Linux support DVD (the blue one on top that’s labeled “Dell Portable n Series”).

Even these days, not all vendors respond to support requests if you don’t have an active contract or a seven figure corporate account to hang off of… but I gotta give Dell credit for making this semi-fanboy (I probably have at least a dozen Dell machines, laptops and desktops and workstations and a couple of rackmount servers) very happy to be a Dell customer.

Thank you, Dell.

That is all.