PC Upgrades
I’ve finally updated some parts of my PC that I’ve needed to do for a while now. I’ve had my computer about three years now, and I was still using some of the original hardware, including the original CPU and motherboard. As time has progressed this hardware has rapidly become out of date and I’ve recently noticed my computer taking forever to load just a simple program. So, the other day I thought “enough is enough, it’s time to upgrade”.
Due to starting university in September, I’m on a very limited budget as I need to save as much as I can. However, I’ve managed to get some pretty good new hardware for roughly £200 in total. The first thing to buy was a new CPU. The old one was only a 1GHz chip which is now below the standard for many new programs, especially games. I found a fairly cheap AMD Sempron 2800+ (2GHz) chip online, so bought one. Next was the motherboard. My old one worked fine but it can only take chips that are upto 1.4GHz, so again I found a fairly cheap MSI motherboard which could handle my new chip easily. Finally, I needed some new DDR RAM, as the RAM in the old board was only SD RAM and of no use to me anymore. All done? Sadly not.
That was everything I was intending to replace, but problems soon arose. Yesterday after I had placed the new board into the tower I found that the new board was slightly wider than the last, and although it still fit, the back of my DVD drive was hanging over the edge of the cable that connects my power supply to the motherboard. As I moved the DVD drive it cut across the power cable and left wire exposed. Uncomfortable with the idea of using a damaged cable, I decided to get a new PSU. However, I realised that I would still have the same problem with a new power supply in place, so decided to hunt for a new, slightly larger tower unit that had enough room for the mainboard without the ROM drives getting in the way. The hunt for a new tower began and I’ve come back with something very special. It’s a silver tower with a clear window in the side. It has three fans and 4 LED’s around each fan (one red, one yellow, a green and a blue). Additionally, there is a blue fluorescent strip light in there that gives the inside a nice blue tint when the power is on. It looks very impressive, especially in the dark. If only I had a digital camera I would take a photo and post it. Of course, I thought it was better to get a slightly more powerful PSU due to all the lights and fans in there drawing power. All in all the price was still reasonable.
To finish off I bought a new graphics card whilst I was out. There was nothing really wrong with the fairly new card I had, but we needed an upgrade for the graphics card in the other machine and found a cheap GeForce FX 5200 card which produced some really good looking graphics, so I decided to grab another one of those for myself whilst I was out. I’ve not had much time to test it yet but what I’ve seen so far looks quite impressive.
The actual installation of the new hardware went fairly well yesterday but I ran into serious problems when I first turned the system on again. That’s because what I hadn’t taken into account when buying all the new stuff was that Windows XP doesn’t like major hardware changes due to the way XP is installed. Therefore when I booted up the machine Windows simply wouldn’t load (not even in safe mode) and I was forced to format the drive and reinstall XP. I obviously have a lot of software to reinstall, but thankfully I keep backups of all my important things on both my second hard drive and my laptop, so only very little data was actually lost.
Everything is up and running again and I’m in the process of reinstalling everything and getting the PC back on track to how it was before. If anyone was wondering why I’ve hardly been online over the last couple of days you probably see why now. That said, I managed to prove to myself I could install a new motherboard, which I had actually never done before, simply because my last machine was still my first, which was built for me years ago. I’m quite looking forward to building my brothers PC for him in a month or two now.
Now I’m going to go back to the long list of things to reinstall and see what I can get done before bed. 