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What can i upgrade on my friends old Dell?

OverVolt

OverVolt

Lifer
Hey all!

My friends got this real old DellXPS from somewhere around 1998-1999. It has a TNT2 16meg. 12Gig HD, 28kmodem,PII 450, 128megs of Pc-133, and a DVD-rom with hardware decoder, and some old soundcard in an ISA slot.

Anyways i have an old Gf2 Mx400 64meg lying around i'd be willing to give him since i have no use for it and a 64meg stick of pc-133 infinon, I check'ed the Dell brand memory is made by infinon, so it would work decent together.

I'm worried about the GF2 since it's AGP4x, not sure if it'll run on AGP2x/1x. I'll have to check the BIOS and see that voltage it runs at correct?

Also i think a Harddrive would give him a big boost his sounds like a 4,200Rpm'er Seagate from back in the day. A 7,200rpm drive would be nice, althought it would be restricted by ATA66 on the mobo, which isn't areal prob since 66mb/s is more than enough. What do you think?

BTW i know he shud junk it a get a new rig, but doesn't have the money right now so a lil upgrade to hold em off is all i plan on doin.

I'm not familiar with working on Dells, not sure how ugly it'll be in the inside. Think there will be any problems?
 
AGP 4X cards are backward compatible with AGP2X slots. Always.

ATA66 isn't much of a limit even for the newest drives. They can sometimes burst above that on a faster controller, but not enough to consider it not worth upgrading him.

The inside will probably be ugly. But not too bad, they generally are easy to open up and get to parts.
 
Just upgraded an old PII350 Packard-Hell from the same era and you should be able to use a slotket to change it to as high as a 1ghz+ celery coppermine or PIII or even a Slot-T and Tually 1.2-1.4. I just upped it to a celery366@550 for 20$ for now and later I'll try the Slot-T and Tually on it.
 
Hey! Didn't think of a slocket, good idea, thanks!

Lord Evermore thanks for the heads up on backwards compatibility.

Anything else i can try doing?
 
Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER
Just upgraded an old PII350 Packard-Hell from the same era and you should be able to use a slotket to change it to as high as a 1ghz+ celery coppermine or PIII or even a Slot-T and Tually 1.2-1.4. I just upped it to a celery366@550 for 20$ for now and later I'll try the Slot-T and Tually on it.
Click to expand...

Or buy a modded slotket. Its not garunteed to work, but you can search to see if it works. I have a XPS T series, and I have a modded slotket running a Tualatin Celeron 1Ghz CPU
 
if you can get your hands on a slot 1 1ghz (100 fsb) all you have to do is flash the bios and it should work fine...
 
Originally posted by: dexvx
Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER
Just upgraded an old PII350 Packard-Hell from the same era and you should be able to use a slotket to change it to as high as a 1ghz+ celery coppermine or PIII or even a Slot-T and Tually 1.2-1.4. I just upped it to a celery366@550 for 20$ for now and later I'll try the Slot-T and Tually on it.
Click to expand...

Or buy a modded slotket. Its not garunteed to work, but you can search to see if it works. I have a XPS T series, and I have a modded slotket running a Tualatin Celeron 1Ghz CPU
Click to expand...
Nice! I couldn't do anything with the Intel version bios but I flashed it to the last PB bios from the UK site and it took the MSI slotket and 366@550 no problemo. I may try the slotket mod as I found a couple sites show how to do it to run the Tually with it.
 
Yeah, I'd say a
Stot-T $20
Tualeron 1.4 GHz $60
another 256 Meg ram $50 or so, or just put in that extra 64 you have
A fast HD would make a world of difference
The video card is an upgrade from what he has.
 
Thanks for all the help!

What oldfart suggested looks like a good deal, can prolly upgrade it for like $150. Not too bad.

But what is the FSB PII's used? I'm not too familiar with them, I'll need to check on dells site for the max supported CPU speed. I've never flashed the BIOS on a Dell before nebody have N E expeirence? I don't wanna fry my friends BIOS.

MechBgon the PC's not around i can't check, i just wrote down what i thought i would need.
 
The P2 450 would be using the 100MHz FSB. I was asking about the RAM because we had a Dell P3 450 that happened to have ECC memory (9 chips per side, not 8) and I was curious. I was able to add some non-ECC memory to ours without it freaking out.

Edit: also, I think your HDD idea is good. That is one s l o w drive in ours. 😛
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
The P2 450 would be using the 100MHz FSB. I was asking about the RAM because we had a Dell P3 450 that happened to have ECC memory (9 chips per side, not 8) and I was curious. I was able to add some non-ECC memory to ours without it freaking out.

Edit: also, I think your HDD idea is good. That is one s l o w drive in ours. 😛
Click to expand...

Also check to see whether the board supports High Density Single Sided Modules.

I recently attempted upgrading a friends Dell PC to 384mb ram, (128 already in there and 256 i was puttin in).

To my horror when i booted up I discovered the board only detecting an extra 128mb because the board did not support single sided High Density Modules.

If you can, try and get double sided Low Density stuff, I would imagine someone must have some older modules lying around for sale.

Dan :beer: 🙂
 
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