- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,570
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I had someone bring me an eMachines PC, with a Celeron D 3.2Ghz CPU in it. The mobo is semi-modern, it has a PCI-E x16 slot, and four SATA ports, along with the two IDE ports. It has ATI X200 onboard video, so I presume it's an ATI chipset, but the board shows the Intel logo when booting up. Was the X200 video chip also a standalone?
Anyways, the default configuration for drives, is an IDE DVD-RW (or possibly a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo, I didn't test writing a DVD with it), and a 120GB IDE HDD.
I upgraded the RAM from 2x512MB to 2x1GB (as I had that available, and from my internet searching, 2GB is the max the board supports), and I added a Radeon 5450 1GB DDR3 PCI-E video card (for watching videos online), and then I added a 640GB WD AAKS HDD, which was one of the fastest HDDs on the market at the time it was released. Still a fairly speedy HDD. I cloned the 120GB IDE (XP MCE) to the 640GB SATA using Ghost 2003, and unplugged the original HDD. Clone booted fine.
Running AVG in the background.
With the added RAM, and the added, faster HDD, web browsing is nearly snappy. Not quite as good as my quad-core with SSD, but for what it is, it's not bad.
I found a table listing CPU compatibility with that mobo, and no C2D CPUs were listed. Otherwise, I was going to throw in an E2140. Apparently, a Pentium D is supported (and they are cheap enough on eBay), but they require a BIOS upgrade, and someone commented that they found something on the net about people screwing up their boards due to attempted BIOS flashing, because the Intel branded board wasn't quite the same as the OEM branded (eMachines) board. So I decided not to risk it.
Is there anything I should have done differently? Would a machine this old (and with such a slow CPU) be a candidate for an SSD? I could see it if the owner wanted to upgrade to Windows 7 64-bit, but with XP MCE still on the machine (no TRIM), I figured it was best to stick to a fast HDD rather than an SSD.
Btw, when I put the 640GB into the machine originally, it had an old install of Win7 64-bit on it (Celeron D support 64-bit). It was snappy, far more snappy than XP MCE, as far as I could tell. But then again, it didn't have an A/V running in the background, either.
Anyways, the default configuration for drives, is an IDE DVD-RW (or possibly a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo, I didn't test writing a DVD with it), and a 120GB IDE HDD.
I upgraded the RAM from 2x512MB to 2x1GB (as I had that available, and from my internet searching, 2GB is the max the board supports), and I added a Radeon 5450 1GB DDR3 PCI-E video card (for watching videos online), and then I added a 640GB WD AAKS HDD, which was one of the fastest HDDs on the market at the time it was released. Still a fairly speedy HDD. I cloned the 120GB IDE (XP MCE) to the 640GB SATA using Ghost 2003, and unplugged the original HDD. Clone booted fine.
Running AVG in the background.
With the added RAM, and the added, faster HDD, web browsing is nearly snappy. Not quite as good as my quad-core with SSD, but for what it is, it's not bad.
I found a table listing CPU compatibility with that mobo, and no C2D CPUs were listed. Otherwise, I was going to throw in an E2140. Apparently, a Pentium D is supported (and they are cheap enough on eBay), but they require a BIOS upgrade, and someone commented that they found something on the net about people screwing up their boards due to attempted BIOS flashing, because the Intel branded board wasn't quite the same as the OEM branded (eMachines) board. So I decided not to risk it.
Is there anything I should have done differently? Would a machine this old (and with such a slow CPU) be a candidate for an SSD? I could see it if the owner wanted to upgrade to Windows 7 64-bit, but with XP MCE still on the machine (no TRIM), I figured it was best to stick to a fast HDD rather than an SSD.
Btw, when I put the 640GB into the machine originally, it had an old install of Win7 64-bit on it (Celeron D support 64-bit). It was snappy, far more snappy than XP MCE, as far as I could tell. But then again, it didn't have an A/V running in the background, either.
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