Refurbishing an old computer

June 21st, 2009 · 2 Comments

A buddy of mine and I are currently refurbishing old omputers and making them into newer upgraded computers. If you need some advice doing this drop me a line, or if you want it done maybe we can come to a price agreement for refurbishing your old computer. Anyways I had a dell PC didnt like the way it ran or anything about it really. So we tore it apart, stripped it right down to bare bones nothing, kept nothing other than the 2 hard drives (more on that later) and thats an interesting problem in itself.

What we installed to refurbish an old computer.

AMD AM2 CPU HT2000 and Dual DDR2 800 Motherboard

AMD690GM-M2_V1.0A

The CPU processor is an AMD athlon 64x 2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ at 2.0 ghz

AMD athlon 3800

We then dropped a GB of ram on the board and then the video card

VC-MSI-N9500GT-MD1GOC-1-250x250

Im actually pretty stoked about this little card, heres some specs on the card. And to boot its an HDMI card. Always a good thing to have now a days.

nVIDIA® unified architecture
Microsoft® DirectX® 10 Shader Model 4 Support
Geometry Instancing 2.0
Displacement Mapping
nVIDIA® Lumenex™ Visual Quality Technology
OpenGL® 2.1 Optimizations and Support
PCI Express 2.0
Dual-Link DVI Support
Flexible Memory Interface
Memory interface power management
Adaptive PCI Express Interface
High efficiency integrated programmable third generation Video Processor (VP2)
nVIDIA® PureVideo HD Technology
Hardware acceleration for industry standard video codecs
Digital Displays
High quality 10-bit display pipeline
nVIDIA® nView Multi-Display Technology
Integrated HDMI Support
Digital Content Protection
128 Bit Studio-Precision Computation
Integrated DisplayPort Support
Integrated HDTV Encoder
Dual 400 Mhz RAMDACs
Support for audio input via SPDIF and HD-Audio
Support for stereo as well as multi-channel LPCM audio streams (multi-channel is only supported via HD-Audio)
Support for Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus*, DTS, WMAPro, MPEG*, audio formats.
The GPU supports these formats, but requires OS support to output audio in these formats.

We also installed 2 fans , a CPU fan. so theres plenty of cooling going on.

The Refurbished pc now runs ALOT better, faster smoother

Now for the hard drives conundrum and hopefully someone of you out there will have a little help for me/us with this problem. When we turned on the PC we got to a screen which basically told us we were screwed, you know the screen the blue screen of death. It wasnt letting us boot from C drive which is where all my life and apps are launched from.

I have 2 HD’s installed one of which (the master) is partitioned, the other is a whole seperate drive. Now what we did was installed windows XP pro on the d drive (partition) so now it boots from D. But we cannot figure out to get it to boot from C.

Tags: Geekery

2 responses so far ↓

Gaming Computer Built On A Budget | shanehigginbottom.com // Sep 27, 2009 at 9:33 am

[...] is going to be dedicated to building a budget gaming computer. For the past little while ive been refurbishing computers with a friend of mine. Its been a good learning experince and good for dusting out the cobwebs. Yes [...]
Upgrade my PC or rebuild it | shanehigginbottom.com // Oct 10, 2009 at 1:13 pm

[...] If you’re curious as to what I have in my existing PC you can check out this earlier post refurbishing an old computer [...]

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