  oh!"We had two Dell PCs, an H266 (266MHz Pentium II) and a T700 (700MHz Pentium III). We have a teensy home LAN, with the T700 downstairs in the family room, the H266 in my son's room upstairs, and an old 133MHz Pentium I in a guest room upstairs. The downstairs PC has the ADSL connection, and the upstairs PCs get to the internet via SyGate. It was November  2000 and I decided for Christmas to upgrade my son's H266 to a 700MHz Celeron, by using one of these cool PowerLeap thingies (you'll have to bear with me on the use of technical jargon). I ordered it and received it a few days before Xmas. Long story short: it did not work. If you're curious, you can read the details in my posting to the PowerLeap discussion group here (I am no-1-u-no). Anyway, I returned it and received a refund. The PowerLeap folks genuinely regretted their inability to help me get the upgrade to work, to the extent that they offered to buy my H266 system, so they could hammer on it back in the lab. After the teensiest bit of bartering, I decided to take my first venture into computer building, and so told PowerLeap they had a deal!
This was the week after Christmas. My son's big prezzie had been the basic Lego Studios set, which uses a USB camera. This worked fine on the H266 (which, following the failed upgrade, was again an H266). Since I was soon going to be gutting the H266 and shipping it off to PowerLeap, I checked to make sure the Lego USB camera would work on the T700 (so my son would be able to use Lego Studio while I was building the new PC). It wouldn't. I mean, it really REALLY wouldn't work. I tried lots and lots of different things, including time on the telephone with the Lego and Dell tech support folks, to no avail. Finally, I decided to try a BIOS upgrade. I already had the latest Dell BIOS (A11), but Dell isn't known for updating their BIOSes all that often, so I sought the latest BIOS from my motherboard's manufacturer. I determined that my T700 had an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard, and downloaded the latest Intel BIOS (P17), and flashed it in. Arrgh! To read what happened, lookie here. The bottom line was that the Intel BIOS refused to work with the 700MHz CPU, and the Dell BIOS would not flash because Dell BIOSes check and will not flash if the resident BIOS is not Dell. [Aside RANT: why would Dell do this? No conceivable reason except to be assholic. To see the imbecilic Dell tech support reply to my query, lookie here -- note that it (1) ignores what I explained in my query about what I had done, and (2) tries to claim the motherboard may have been damaged by the BIOS produced by the company that manufactured it.] The Dell tech support folks said that the only way to get a motherboard in that PC with a Dell BIOS in it would be to buy a new one from Dell: price $250. Since this is an out-of-date (100MHz FSB) motherboard that sells for $100 retail and $50 on eBay, I decided to look elsewhere. [The Dell/Intel motherboard from the T700 now decorates my wall, and a picture of it is the background for this page.] BUT, I would have to do more than replace the motherboard, since Dell uses its own power supply and front panel connectors (which I acknowledge to be reasonable for a mass-produced consumer product). So, I would need a new motherboard, case, and power supply, JUST TO GET THIS COMPUTER WORKING AGAIN. Note that this all started with my making sure that this PC would be usable while I built a new one from the pieces from the H266 that I sold to PowerLeap. The "T700" machine would still work, marginally, with the CPU from the H266 plugged into it, but basically I had to get 2 PCs going. Because I was starting with many components pilfered from my previous systems, I did NOT have to buy the following (because I already had the following):
Memory: Already had a no-name OEM 128MB PC100 DIMM for the 700MHz P3. For the 1GHz Athlon, I got a Crucial 128 MB PC133 CL2 DIMM for $78. Motherboards: I started this knowing NOTHING about motherboards etc. So I read lots of things on lots of websites, and quickly made decisions. I did not want to be adventurous: I wanted solid, stable, reliable, and popular boards (with lots of users out there, and dedicated newsgroups, to facilitate problem-solving). So I soon decided to get one ABIT and one ASUS (to get some experience in the Great ABIT v. ASUS Debate). The 700MHz P3 is "Slot 1" and the 1GHz Athlon is "Socket A" (I am not writing a tutorial here, so I am not going to try to explain what these terms mean.) For both I wanted:
  Once I figured out that these were my criteria (which was nontrivial), it didn't actually take long to decide on an ABIT KT7 ($129, on the left) for the 1GHz Athlon and an ASUS P3V4X ($110, on the right) for the 700MHz P3.
Cases: To be sure I'd be able to install anything and everything my heart may someday desire, I wanted 300W power supplies (which usually come with the case) and mid-tower cases. I decided to get one Rolls Royce case: the case for a lifetime, the 3DCool Tornado 1000 ($170). As a lark, for my son's PC I absolutely fixated on the translucent plastic Nikao Submarine   (see pix left & right -- you can see lots of pictures in this Tom's Hardware article), but alas they were not yet available anywhere. So I gave up and bought a store-brand from CompUSA (the picture on the CompUSA site is different) -- which in retrospect I have to say was a very pleasant case to work with and with which I find no fault and much to admire.
|