- Joined
- Mar 5, 2002
- Messages
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My Mum turned 80 last April and figured she didn't want or need her computer anymore and offered it to me. I suggested that as I was actually quite ok in the computer dept perhaps my sister would apreciate it more.
So I got the machine, messed with the software a bit and delivered it to my sister where she's now using it on a daily basis.
It's quite an old machine, socket 939 Asrock Dual SATA 2, but it was still an improvement on her old machine.
I brought my sister's old machine home, swiped the CDRW drive when my Plextor drive packed up and thought I'd break it down for spare parts.
Then I looked at it and though I'd try and make a working machine from it.
The OS, Win XP, was crippled to a crawl with two viruses that I later found originated from two pictures my sister's 13-year-old daughter had downloaded from a friend on Facebook. I hooked the drive up to another machine via a caddy and pulled all relevant stuff off of it and saved to a couple of DVD's.
I then found out the monitor was faulty. The display lit up but no picture info. It was a crappy old square 15" so I took the switched mode PSU out and dumped the rest.
Also faulty were the DVD-ROM drive, floppy disk drive and the CMOS battery.
I had a DVD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive spare but they were silver so I sprayed the front fascia's to match the matt black generic case and fitted the two optical drives. I had a spare black floppy disk drive, fitted that, and then fitted a CMOS battery, I have quite a few of those spare in my junk pile.
The video card's fan was extremely noisy so I replaced that with a spare one I'd kept from a failed card.
Re-fitted the CPU heatsink (looks like a thermalright) with some Arctic Silver and fitted an 80mm Pabst fan I had spare that was quieter and also faster than the one it replaced.
Fitted a quiet Zalman 80mm fan to rear of case to exhaust heat.
Also had a spare wireless NIC card - a Linksys WMP54G so fitted that and connected to my router ok.
This machine had two 256Mb sticks of PC3200 RAM @ 333Mhz. I had a spare PC3200 512Mb stick @ 400Mhz so fitted that and now have a gig of memory. As I only used 3 slots out of four it means I lost the dual memory function but I think twice as much memory outweighs that minor disadvantage.
Here's the base system as it is now, installed with Win XP:
Black generic case
Jeantech 350 watt PSU
Gigabyte GA7N400 Pro 2 motherboard
AMD Socket A single core 1.1Ghz CPU
1Gb memory
Nvidia 5700LE video card, 128Mb RAM
DVDRW Drive
DVD-ROM drive
Floppy disk drive
Maxtor 40Gb IDE HDD
Linksys WMP54G Wireless NIC Card
Not the fastest machine in the world but still quite respectable and a fine workhorse for anybody just wanting net access and office.
I needed some software to monitor the CPU temp so from V_R's forum list of software I chose Core Temp 32 Bit and tried it. It didn't work, perhaps it doesn't like older machines. So I installed Speedfan which works fine and current CPU temp is 36C, which is fine.
So there you go, a revived machine and it hasn't cost me a penny so far, it pays to keep spare parts.
But - I don't need it, lol, so unless I can find a friend or relative who needs such a machine it'll go down the lockup until I find a use for it.
Next up, I'm going to try and install Windows 95 to the socket A machine that I do use on a seperate hard disk in a removable caddy.
To install Win 95 I only have an upgrade disk so I may have to install Win 3.1 from floppies first but I'm hoping the Win 95 CD will only ask for proof and I have to show it the first 3.1 floppy.
Why install Win 95? Is that perverse? Nope, I just fancy running the game Little Big Adventure 2 and it will only run in Win 95. I have a funny feeling something won't work though, we shall see.
So I got the machine, messed with the software a bit and delivered it to my sister where she's now using it on a daily basis.
It's quite an old machine, socket 939 Asrock Dual SATA 2, but it was still an improvement on her old machine.
I brought my sister's old machine home, swiped the CDRW drive when my Plextor drive packed up and thought I'd break it down for spare parts.
Then I looked at it and though I'd try and make a working machine from it.
The OS, Win XP, was crippled to a crawl with two viruses that I later found originated from two pictures my sister's 13-year-old daughter had downloaded from a friend on Facebook. I hooked the drive up to another machine via a caddy and pulled all relevant stuff off of it and saved to a couple of DVD's.
I then found out the monitor was faulty. The display lit up but no picture info. It was a crappy old square 15" so I took the switched mode PSU out and dumped the rest.
Also faulty were the DVD-ROM drive, floppy disk drive and the CMOS battery.
I had a DVD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive spare but they were silver so I sprayed the front fascia's to match the matt black generic case and fitted the two optical drives. I had a spare black floppy disk drive, fitted that, and then fitted a CMOS battery, I have quite a few of those spare in my junk pile.
The video card's fan was extremely noisy so I replaced that with a spare one I'd kept from a failed card.
Re-fitted the CPU heatsink (looks like a thermalright) with some Arctic Silver and fitted an 80mm Pabst fan I had spare that was quieter and also faster than the one it replaced.
Fitted a quiet Zalman 80mm fan to rear of case to exhaust heat.
Also had a spare wireless NIC card - a Linksys WMP54G so fitted that and connected to my router ok.
This machine had two 256Mb sticks of PC3200 RAM @ 333Mhz. I had a spare PC3200 512Mb stick @ 400Mhz so fitted that and now have a gig of memory. As I only used 3 slots out of four it means I lost the dual memory function but I think twice as much memory outweighs that minor disadvantage.
Here's the base system as it is now, installed with Win XP:
Black generic case
Jeantech 350 watt PSU
Gigabyte GA7N400 Pro 2 motherboard
AMD Socket A single core 1.1Ghz CPU
1Gb memory
Nvidia 5700LE video card, 128Mb RAM
DVDRW Drive
DVD-ROM drive
Floppy disk drive
Maxtor 40Gb IDE HDD
Linksys WMP54G Wireless NIC Card
Not the fastest machine in the world but still quite respectable and a fine workhorse for anybody just wanting net access and office.
I needed some software to monitor the CPU temp so from V_R's forum list of software I chose Core Temp 32 Bit and tried it. It didn't work, perhaps it doesn't like older machines. So I installed Speedfan which works fine and current CPU temp is 36C, which is fine.
So there you go, a revived machine and it hasn't cost me a penny so far, it pays to keep spare parts.
But - I don't need it, lol, so unless I can find a friend or relative who needs such a machine it'll go down the lockup until I find a use for it.
Next up, I'm going to try and install Windows 95 to the socket A machine that I do use on a seperate hard disk in a removable caddy.
To install Win 95 I only have an upgrade disk so I may have to install Win 3.1 from floppies first but I'm hoping the Win 95 CD will only ask for proof and I have to show it the first 3.1 floppy.
Why install Win 95? Is that perverse? Nope, I just fancy running the game Little Big Adventure 2 and it will only run in Win 95. I have a funny feeling something won't work though, we shall see.
Just for the one game...Mind if you've got it, flaunt it!
