Dell systems of that age aren't the most flexible for memory. If you can find memory that's guaranteed compatible with the PowerEdge 2400 for very little money you've got a start.

The memory specs are:

SDRAM
CL=3
Registered ECC
133MHz
3.3V
64Meg x 72

Crucial has this, but the price of 2GB with them is way more than just buying a new desktop (that'll be way more powerful and have a lot more storage).

There is one catch; this system uses SCSI drives on a hotswap backplane. This will limit you to very expensive SCSI SCA-80 (hotswap) drives (expensive compared to SATA drives). The max drive size for those type of drives is 300GB.

You may be better off just buying or building a more modern system with 2 SATA drives in a raid 1. This would be a lot less expensive.

What operating system could I upgrade this server too without it crashing?

If you want a Windows-based server OS? If so, Windows 2000 Server should work. Windows 2003 may work too, but I'm not sure how 'fast' it'll be on (2) Pentium 3 processors.

If you're considering a desktop OS version, you'll need a Pro version of Windows 2000 or XP as the Home versions (and 95/98/98SE/ME) don't support dual processor.

Any ideas on a video card that I could upgrade to with this system?  Thank you for your help by the way.

Hey Jason got your message about the 2400.

I have 2 of them running in my basement. One is a Linux Server running Fedora. The other is running Server 2003.

I recommend doing the following:

1) Pull out the SCSI backplane (located behind the drives) and throw it in the garbage.

2) Add in a Promise ATA 100 Tx2 IDE card (to run IDE drives). I am currently running the Promise card because it works perfectly with the architecture, boots and supports 4 drives. I tried a SATA card in a Poweredge 2450 but it would not boot from an SATA drive (hard drive or DVD drive). Problem is you can only get 500mg drives in IDE. So I am going to add an SATA card as a secondary card and add a bank of 1tb drives.

As for O/S, I would stay with 2003 or lower if you are going to keep the existing motherboard. I am thinking of pulling the motherboard and installing a new dual core mobo with sata already onboard. This may mean swaping powersupplies, but I will see when I pull it apart.

Hope this helps. any more questions, just ask

Ken

Oops almost forgot the ram. Poweredge 2400's ONLY use PE2400 ramm, look for PE2400/512 ram on ebay....they come up every so often...and of course 2gig is the max they will take.

As for video card....why bother. you are planning on using this as a File Server....don't waste you money

Were you still able to utilize the hard drive slots on the front of the 2400 with the Promise ATA 100 tx2 IDE card?