Just wanted to thank you guys for helping me decide how to upgrade my system... I have finally got it all up and running and it all runs great.
Just thought I'd share some tips for other upgraders out there so they DON'T make the same mistakes I did.
#1) Pay attention when installing the heat sink! Make sure it's facing the correct way BEFORE you let it touch the CPU!
I dropped that sucker on top and then realized that I wanted the connection for the fan on the other side, so I pulled it off, turned it around, put it back on. BIG MISTAKE! If you take the heat sink off, you need to clean off the thermal compound from both the heat sink and the cpu, and apply brand new thermal compound. I had no idea how important this is. At first I had the cpu overheating and the bios shutting off the system within 15 minutes of turning on, at idle! I pulled off the heatsink again, spread the thermal compound around, put it back on... and thought that solved the problem. But no... that was fine for the cpu at idle... but under constant load for a hour.... overheating again. It took a trip to Fry's and buying some Arctic Clean and Arctic Silver 5, getting the heatsink and cpu nice and clean, then applying the new thermal compound to get this working properly. If you think you might screw up, make sure you have some cleaner and thermal compound handy before you try and install a new cpu!
#2) Before you do your upgrade, make a SP2 XP install disk! Google for 'SP2 XP slipstream' for instructions, especially if doing the Windows 'Repair' method for installing new hardware. I didn't think this would be a big deal, but it is. If you use your original install disks to repair an sp2 install, it probably won't boot, you'll get a blue screen instead.
I ended up installing XP to my second hard drive to get my system to boot up. Turns out this drive is faster anyway, and I'm liking my clean xp install and faster boot up times so I've decided to stick with this new install and I'm just going to wipe the xp install on my original drive.
Anyway, after all that I've got a system thats faster and in fact feels a lot more stable, so I'm very happy! Thanks for all your help!
-Andy
Just thought I'd share some tips for other upgraders out there so they DON'T make the same mistakes I did.
#1) Pay attention when installing the heat sink! Make sure it's facing the correct way BEFORE you let it touch the CPU!
I dropped that sucker on top and then realized that I wanted the connection for the fan on the other side, so I pulled it off, turned it around, put it back on. BIG MISTAKE! If you take the heat sink off, you need to clean off the thermal compound from both the heat sink and the cpu, and apply brand new thermal compound. I had no idea how important this is. At first I had the cpu overheating and the bios shutting off the system within 15 minutes of turning on, at idle! I pulled off the heatsink again, spread the thermal compound around, put it back on... and thought that solved the problem. But no... that was fine for the cpu at idle... but under constant load for a hour.... overheating again. It took a trip to Fry's and buying some Arctic Clean and Arctic Silver 5, getting the heatsink and cpu nice and clean, then applying the new thermal compound to get this working properly. If you think you might screw up, make sure you have some cleaner and thermal compound handy before you try and install a new cpu!
#2) Before you do your upgrade, make a SP2 XP install disk! Google for 'SP2 XP slipstream' for instructions, especially if doing the Windows 'Repair' method for installing new hardware. I didn't think this would be a big deal, but it is. If you use your original install disks to repair an sp2 install, it probably won't boot, you'll get a blue screen instead.
I ended up installing XP to my second hard drive to get my system to boot up. Turns out this drive is faster anyway, and I'm liking my clean xp install and faster boot up times so I've decided to stick with this new install and I'm just going to wipe the xp install on my original drive.
Anyway, after all that I've got a system thats faster and in fact feels a lot more stable, so I'm very happy! Thanks for all your help!
-Andy
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