The new parts arrive today, so I set about building a new PC after I get back from work. All in all it works out rather painlessly. It takes about 2hours to do the hardware bit. The only two problems were first getting the motherboard screwed in place. A serious about of physical exertion was required to get the mounting holes over the mounts. The second problem was that the rear peripheral plate had the network socket covered. To remove properly would require taking the PC back apart (and unmount the motherboard…). I managed to get it uncovered from the outside without doing too much damage. The whole thing works ok too.
The software stuff just involved adding a few drivers. Windows 2000 seemed to cope quite well with running on a whole different PC.
The new PC is a P4, 2.26Ghz, 256MB of PC2100 DDR (I’ll buy another 256 when I can afford it, which isn’t now). On an Intel 845G based Gigabyte motherboard (my supplier doesn’t do Intel boards for some reason). Graphics is onboard (the Voodoo3 I’d been using wouldn’t have worked), as is LAN, and if I choose to, Sound (though with the soundcard I have now, that’ll be unlikely). Lots of USB ports too.
Can’t really tell if the PC is any faster, I find that quite hard to measure with office apps like Outlook, IE and so on.

Posted by Phil on August 02, 2002 12:00 PM | Categories: Misc