The Dell T105 PowerEdge represents great value for money as an entry level server, however the inclusion of one of the supported server operating systems considerably increases the cost. I therefore chose to purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows XP Professional elsewhere and install this myself without the assistance offered by Dell's Build And Update Utility CD that accompanies the server. This meant that I had to individually locate all of the XP drivers for the various components of this machine. These were hard to find because the Dell site primarily allows you to search only by machine not device, and as XP is unsupported on this machine the required drivers was not listed there. Some were eventually located elsewhere on the Dell site, and others were either found on the component manufacturer's sites, or on sites of other system manufacturers who use these devices.

Please note that mine is a 2.8Ghz Dual-Core AMD Opteron machine running BIOS v1.0.1 and that other versions of the T105 may require different drivers.

Once XP is installed you'll need to install the Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet driver, the nVidia nForce Professional (2200 MCP) mainboard drivers and the ATI RN50 (ES1000) graphics driver. You will note that none of these download links are from Dell, but they seem to work ok.

The onboard graphics are rather basic, so I installed an Hewlett Packard nVidia GeForce 8400GS 256MB PCIe x1 (GJ120AA) card and disabled the onboard device in Device Manager to prevent an Event Log error on boot. There are very few PCIe x1 graphics cards available; the other two I know of being the HIS X1550 512MB HyperMemory 256MB DDR2 PCIe x1 and the Galaxy Geforce 7300GT DDR3 PCIe x1 which are alternatives you might wish to consider. I have also been informed that a PCIe x16 graphics card has been successfully used in one of the x8 slots having cut the end of the slot out. If you do this though, you must take great care not to damage any of the contacts in the slot, and to ensure that the card is well-seated.

Whilst I found a solution to installing XP on the SAS 6i/R RAID array using the R165652 driver, I failed to solve post-install problems with using RAID and am now using the disks plugged directly into the SATA ports on the mainboard. The insurmountable problem that I encoutered was registry corruption caused by the machine switching off before these critical OS files were closed upon shutdown. However, I have been informed that others have successfully used RAID with Windows XP on their T105.

As the T105 has no onboard sound I'm using an Edirol UA-25EX USB audio/MIDI interface, but there are numerous other USB audio interfaces that would also do the job.

Latest update was made on 8th December 2010. Further updates will be made as and when I have more information which might be of use. Please contact me if you wish to submit such information, and do feel free to visit my main site which has information about my career as a professional musician.