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Refurbishing Old PC for daughter

C

Careless Joe

Junior Member
Bought this at a garage sale for $30. Board has what appears to be an agp slot, but I can't tell what speed it is.

I figure if I throw in some ram and add a vid card it'll do til I can buy something better. Compaq site doesn't have a lot of documentation.

Anyone have any ideas what kind of card I can plop in here?


Oh yeah, its a compaq presario 5710 with 96 megs of ram, 450 Mhz k6-2 cpu, and 8 megs of shared video memory. (which is why I wanna put in a new card.)


Thanks in advance.


 
Sorry to put a damper on your good intentions, but this machine is not worth the price of any upgrades. You'll make better use of the money buying good, inexpensive components, new or used, for another system. I do not know where you live, but for example, if you are near a Fry's Electronics:

1. 98 MB of RAM isn't enough, even before you get to the shared memory used by the onboard video, and SD-RAM costs at least twice the price of the least expensive DDR RAM.

This Fry's ad shows 512 MB PNY PC2700 DDR for $44.99 after rebate.

2. The same ad shows a retail AMD Sempron 2500+ (including HS/Fan) with a motherboard for $74.99. They always include ECS motherboards. Unfortunately, the one in this ad uses the SiS chipeset, which I don't recommend, but other specials include boards with nForce2 and VIA chipsets. I've built up both of these boards for friends. The nVidia board has better features, and the VIA machine makes a makes a good, stable machine for basic office use. Both include onboard NIC and at least rudimentary sound until you add a better setup of your choice.

3. The hard drive on your Compaq is 15 GB. You can find 80 - 120 GB drives for around $50, after rebate. Another page from the same ad offers a Maxtor 60 GB drive for $49.99, and you can probably do better.

4. You can probably get a decent nVidia vid card for around $50. It won't be the hottest gaming card on the planet, but it will be lightyears ahead of the onboard shared memory system on the Compaq.

I'm just listing a few examples to show you that you can probably get a much better machine for the same money you've budgeted. Hang out in Hot Deals, and shop the specials in whatever office type stores are in your area (Office Depot, Office Max, Best Buy, etc.). You'll have a lot more machine, and far fewer hassles. 🙂
 
Agree with Harvey.
My 13 year old daughter was doing everything on a P2-450, my main rig. It became too slow and crashed often since it's win98. So I built the P4 3.4c you see in my sig below. Now she can have aol running with 5 chat windows open, Photoshop, Adobe Photo Deluxe, Word to do book reports, surf the web, and it never crashes because it's XP. She photoshops horse pictures, and could be a graphic artist one day. Plus the kid is learning html from the horseland site she visits. So believe it or not, kids need powerful computers.
 
Originally posted by: Harvey
Sorry to put a damper on your good intentions, but this machine is not worth the price of any upgrades. You'll make better use of the money buying good, inexpensive components, new or used, for another system. I do not know where you live, but for example, if you are near a Fry's Electronics:

1. 98 MB of RAM isn't enough, even before you get to the shared memory used by the onboard video, and SD-RAM costs at least twice the price of the least expensive DDR RAM.

This Fry's ad shows 512 MB PNY PC2700 DDR for $44.99 after rebate.

2. The same ad shows a retail AMD Sempron 2500+ (including HS/Fan) with a motherboard for $74.99. They always include ECS motherboards. Unfortunately, the one in this ad uses the SiS chipeset, which I don't recommend, but other specials include boards with nForce2 and VIA chipsets. I've built up both of these boards for friends. The nVidia board has better features, and the VIA machine makes a makes a good, stable machine for basic office use. Both include onboard NIC and at least rudimentary sound until you add a better setup of your choice.

3. The hard drive on your Compaq is 15 GB. You can find 80 - 120 GB drives for around $50, after rebate. Another page from the same ad offers a Maxtor 60 GB drive for $49.99, and you can probably do better.

4. You can probably get a decent nVidia vid card for around $50. It won't be the hottest gaming card on the planet, but it will be lightyears ahead of the onboard shared memory system on the Compaq.

I'm just listing a few examples to show you that you can probably get a much better machine for the same money you've budgeted. Hang out in Hot Deals, and shop the specials in whatever office type stores are in your area (Office Depot, Office Max, Best Buy, etc.). You'll have a lot more machine, and far fewer hassles. 🙂
Click to expand...


I appreciate the advice, but I cant afford all that right now. I went down to the local electronics store and picked up 3 sticks of 128 pc133, and a cheap pci video card. It seems to do just fine for surfing the web and playing kid's educational games. My daughter's three and likes to play games on pbskids.org and a few educational titles that I bought her.

I did take me an hour or two to clean out all the compaq crap and burn a clean image for back-up, but for less than $130 including the money spent to buy the comp originally I think its a pretty nice little box.
 
Originally posted by: NoGodForMe
Agree with Harvey.
My 13 year old daughter was doing everything on a P2-450, my main rig. It became too slow and crashed often since it's win98. So I built the P4 3.4c you see in my sig below. Now she can have aol running with 5 chat windows open, Photoshop, Adobe Photo Deluxe, Word to do book reports, surf the web, and it never crashes because it's XP. She photoshops horse pictures, and could be a graphic artist one day. Plus the kid is learning html from the horseland site she visits. So believe it or not, kids need powerful computers.
Click to expand...

Thats what I'm gonna do with my brother. I'll build a PC for him and install powerful progs like Photoshop, Imageready, Dreamweaver, Flash, haha and let him go.
 
NP. You didn't post your budget, but since, with a little Ferengi sense and some luck, you can assemble a decent basic setup for around $300, I thought the info could help.

Glad you got what you needed. :beer: 😎
 
Here's what I did with my 3 year old daughter.
I use mobile racks for all my drives. Put a 80 gig in a rack with an os for her. When she wants to play with the computer, I power down, slide in her hdrive and bingo, it's her computer to trash as much as she likes. When she's done I power down and slide in my hdrives. This is a loaded 3.2 prescott system for vid editing for me.
It works out well because at 3 years old there's not too much bickering over computer time.
 
Fergengi sense. LOL I love it! And I do appreciate you taking time out fo your day to respond. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Guess need to work on my forum etiquette.
 
Originally posted by: tiap
Here's what I did with my 3 year old daughter.
I use mobile racks for all my drives. Put a 80 gig in a rack with an os for her. When she wants to play with the computer, I power down, slide in her hdrive and bingo, it's her computer to trash as much as she likes. When she's done I power down and slide in my hdrives. This is a loaded 3.2 prescott system for vid editing for me.
It works out well because at 3 years old there's not too much bickering over computer time.
Click to expand...

Thats a great idea!
 
posting questions like these in gh forum on a techfiend site 🙁
these people don't know nothing!
this past weekend, hooked up cable connection he bought from shadetreebackwoodsboondocks video to quiet my mother
he so tickled, he acting like he won the lottery!
after ten minutes of playing on the internet, know what he did? went back to playing freecell
just wasting time talking to knuckleheads like these -- they'll sell they mommas dentures to buy thermal tape!

that's a pretty nice machine -- regarding the video card possibilities? what's the power supply?
looking for it now... but anything less than 200w, get radeon or kyro
gl
 
You probably should have mentioned that your daughter is only three. I was assuming she was a teenager or something.
 
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