techy stuff
Dec. 24th, 2007 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrBeen working on upgrading a couple of machines for Lin & Kermit. Lin's Mom got them cheap at a local (to her) community college selling off "old" systems.
Let's see, we are keeping the motherboards, the case & power supply and the floppy drives. Oh yeah, and the old RAM (sort of).
Going from a 1.7 GHz P4 to a 2.6 (that being the fastest the Intel D845WN motherboard can take). Alas, when I ordered them, I didn't notice there were different bus speeds for 2.6 GHz p4 chips. I gott 800 Mhz bus chips, and the motherboards are 400. Got an email off to the vendor to see about a swap (should be doable as the parts are the same price and they show them in stock)
RAM upgrades were simpler. both had a single 256 meg DIMM. The boards have 3 slots. They can take 512 or 1 gig DIMMs (older PC 133 ones).
Checked prices. 512meg ECC-3 DIMMs were $70 each. I gig DIMMS were $200 each. Gleep.
After a *very* short discussion it was decided that Lin didn't need 3 gig of RAM *that* bad.
So one box is getting 3 512 meg DIMMs for a total of 1.5 gig. The other is getting the 256 meg from the first machine and a 512 meg of its own for a total of 1 gig.
Each box is getting a Diamond XtremeSound 7.1 Channel sound card. 8 channels. Including coax SPDIF in & out. And a Sapphire Radeon 9550 256MB TV-Out/DVI vid card.
The machine going downstairs will likely get tied in to the TV & stereo. Being able to switch the display to a 29" TV will make reading easier. :-)
I'm jealous of the HD upgrades. Each box is getting a 500 gig HD along with a second 500 gig that'll be used to back up the main drive.
And the beat up old CD drives are getting replaced with DVD burners. Since it was only a few bucks more they got ones with LightScribe capability.
The downstairs system is getting a WiFi card too.
So, Chrissy and I went to pick up the drives & cards at our local supplier Friday. The RAM and CPUs were old enough that I'd had to mail order them.
Of course, they were out of the 500 gig drives. And only had one soundcard and one DVD drive. <sigh>
So we go over to Chrissy's and I dig into the one box that's there. Took a bit of digging to find out how to get into the BIOS setup (with the "quick boot" setting the "press .... to enter setup" flashes by too fast to read). Got in there and checked things. And discovered
RAM went in fine. So did sound & vid cards. DVD drive was an easy swap.
Quickly discovered the goof on the CPU when it showed up as only 1.3 GHZ. Sent email to supplier. Also discovered, much to my disgust that the manufacturers docs had *lied*. They said there was a setting in the BIOS to switch from USB 1 to USB 2.0. Nope.
So I gotta see which card they want to get USB 2 support. (a "plain" USB 2.0 multi-port card or a USB/Firewire card)
Went ahead and install most of the freeware/shareware software on the system (I can clone the current drive onto the new drive when we get it, and it'd help spot any problems).
Went thru entirely too many iterations of "Windows upgrades are ready to install). They boxes run Win XP Home (they actually have license stickers!)
I'd had to order a CD from MS (at $30) because I didn't have an XP Home OEM CD. But they wen't well.
Biggest fly in the ointment is that the DVD drive didn't include any DVD decoder Nor does ATI seem to have one. So to play movies, they'll need to get a $15 decoder downloaded. Or they may go for a heavier duty DVD ripping & creation program that includes one.
Let's see, we are keeping the motherboards, the case & power supply and the floppy drives. Oh yeah, and the old RAM (sort of).
Going from a 1.7 GHz P4 to a 2.6 (that being the fastest the Intel D845WN motherboard can take). Alas, when I ordered them, I didn't notice there were different bus speeds for 2.6 GHz p4 chips. I gott 800 Mhz bus chips, and the motherboards are 400. Got an email off to the vendor to see about a swap (should be doable as the parts are the same price and they show them in stock)
RAM upgrades were simpler. both had a single 256 meg DIMM. The boards have 3 slots. They can take 512 or 1 gig DIMMs (older PC 133 ones).
Checked prices. 512meg ECC-3 DIMMs were $70 each. I gig DIMMS were $200 each. Gleep.
After a *very* short discussion it was decided that Lin didn't need 3 gig of RAM *that* bad.
So one box is getting 3 512 meg DIMMs for a total of 1.5 gig. The other is getting the 256 meg from the first machine and a 512 meg of its own for a total of 1 gig.
Each box is getting a Diamond XtremeSound 7.1 Channel sound card. 8 channels. Including coax SPDIF in & out. And a Sapphire Radeon 9550 256MB TV-Out/DVI vid card.
The machine going downstairs will likely get tied in to the TV & stereo. Being able to switch the display to a 29" TV will make reading easier. :-)
I'm jealous of the HD upgrades. Each box is getting a 500 gig HD along with a second 500 gig that'll be used to back up the main drive.
And the beat up old CD drives are getting replaced with DVD burners. Since it was only a few bucks more they got ones with LightScribe capability.
The downstairs system is getting a WiFi card too.
So, Chrissy and I went to pick up the drives & cards at our local supplier Friday. The RAM and CPUs were old enough that I'd had to mail order them.
Of course, they were out of the 500 gig drives. And only had one soundcard and one DVD drive. <sigh>
So we go over to Chrissy's and I dig into the one box that's there. Took a bit of digging to find out how to get into the BIOS setup (with the "quick boot" setting the "press .... to enter setup" flashes by too fast to read). Got in there and checked things. And discovered
RAM went in fine. So did sound & vid cards. DVD drive was an easy swap.
Quickly discovered the goof on the CPU when it showed up as only 1.3 GHZ. Sent email to supplier. Also discovered, much to my disgust that the manufacturers docs had *lied*. They said there was a setting in the BIOS to switch from USB 1 to USB 2.0. Nope.
So I gotta see which card they want to get USB 2 support. (a "plain" USB 2.0 multi-port card or a USB/Firewire card)
Went ahead and install most of the freeware/shareware software on the system (I can clone the current drive onto the new drive when we get it, and it'd help spot any problems).
Went thru entirely too many iterations of "Windows upgrades are ready to install). They boxes run Win XP Home (they actually have license stickers!)
I'd had to order a CD from MS (at $30) because I didn't have an XP Home OEM CD. But they wen't well.
Biggest fly in the ointment is that the DVD drive didn't include any DVD decoder Nor does ATI seem to have one. So to play movies, they'll need to get a $15 decoder downloaded. Or they may go for a heavier duty DVD ripping & creation program that includes one.
