VERY OLD MOBO question

[Corsairpro]

I trust you, but he's an idiot! 🙂 He wants the cheapest upgrade possible... and yes i realize that DSL is like $50 a month but I have to go w/ what he tells me.... I'll call him and see if I can find out what the mobo is

 

[DamageInc]

Good lord, an M2? Tell your bro to ask your parents for a couple hundred or something, and go looking on the hot deals forum. A computer that old just isn't worth upgrading.

Your friend,
Ryan

 

[DamageInc]

And what the hell's he getting DSL for? It's more expensive than cable, and it's usually slower. Dan's messed up in the head.

 

[Paveslave]

He needs to just go buy a small ATX Mobo/CPU combo for around $100 and call it a day. Seriously, it's not that hard to just swap out the Mobo and you can probably get one with built in LAN so he doesn't have to buy a card. Something with this whole idea is just wacky, I'm not getting it.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: Iron Woode

Originally posted by: Corsairpro
My brother has an older compaq that runs at either 233 or 266MHz( i do think its 266 though). It had dimm slots that accepted pc100. Anyway.... the cpu hs/f was square so I'm assuming its not a p2. And only pentiums w/ MMX went over 200MHz. What package type cpu would I need to get to upgrade this computer... say to at least 300MHz? Socket 7, PPGA, SPGA? HELP!

Most old boards in a proprietary PC have limited upgrade potential. If it is Intel 266 then it is P2 (pentium 2 slot 1). If it is AMD then it is Socket7 (K6 266).

It is not worth the bother to upgrade this.

Here are some suggestions:

donate it to a school or charity
Sell it in the classifieds for cheap.
Save it for younger family members to start out with.
Put some network cards in it and use it as a router/firewall.

Here are some more neat things that can be done with old hardware.

Otherwise unless you fancy having a dos machine laying around to play old abandonware video games, gut it and turn it into a novelty hamster cage, use it to keep down tarps on your flower bed during a hailstorm, a nice wheel jam for parking cars on hills that have bad parking brakes, keep it on your passenger seat of your car to use it in a unique form of road rage, prop it up with a stick and a peice of cheese on a string and invent the better mouse trap, play a freindly game of "kick the computer" with your neighbors, try to invent a new strongman contest involving tossing it over your garage and other insudry objects, tie around the neck of a hyperactive dog (or child) to slow it down, practice your jedi skills on it, give it a nice paint job and add a couple neon lights and try to sell it to the idiot at work saying 286 realy means 2.86 mhz and cga graphics is the new hdtv/computer protocol(a steal at $500), use it as a lift kit for a garden gnome to keep it's head above the weeds, use it to fix the sagging porch steps out back, put it in the middle of the sidewalk and then drive a bolt thru the middle of it into the cement and secretly video tape people who try to steal it and sell the tape online as a comedy show, sell it on ebay as Elvis's personal computer, climb to the top of the empire state building and offer a crisp new 100 dollar bill to anyone willing to chuck it over the edge, use it start a wall-o-obsolete computers and try to get on tv 2 am news as being a wacky person, bash it with a hammer for couple hours and sell it as "extreme" art, bash it with a realy big wooden log on a stick and go on tour as a comedian for the super intellegent PBS-veiwer market, put it in someones else's mail box and write on big letters on the top "send this computer to twenty other people and you could get rich, don't send it and end up these poor souls etc etc....", or just toss it in the garbage and make a fishbowl out of the monitor.

 

[RickH]

Let him borrow a faster computer, set up the DSL, then replace it with his machine. His 233 will work as well as a 300. Dot spend $$, just switch boxes to fool the DSL installer. R