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.

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 only other one I found being the HIS X1550 512MB HyperMemory 256MB DDR2 PCIe x1 which is an alternative you might wish to consider. I have sourced both of these cards in the UK at reasonable prices, so do contact me if you're also considering this upgrade.

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.

Latest update was made on 18th July 2008. Further updates will be made as and when I have more information which might be of use.