Rebuilding an Old PC

Sunday, April 13^th, 2008 » Guides, Hardware, Windows

About two and a half months ago, Paul Stamatiou posted an article detailing how you could build a decent bare-bones PC for around $200 that could be a Linux-powered Web/file server. That got me thinking about the old PC I have under my desk (read: table), a Compaq Presario 5WV280 that was purchased in December of 2000. At the time, an AMD Athlon 900MHz processor with 256MB SDRAM, 30GB hard drive, and a 8x CD-RW drive made for a great system, but it is definitely dated by today’s standards. An hour of browsing Newegg resulted in a list of components that would allow me to completely rebuild this system and bring it into the modern era of computing.

Aside from a Tandy 1000 dating from 1986, the Compaq was the first computer I ever owned and also the first exposure I had to a non-Mac OS world that dominated my school at the time. Within a year, I had begun to add various upgrades, first and foremost being an 80GB Maxtor drive to compliment the existing 30GB. My transformation into a geek followed shortly afterward when I bought PartitionMagic v.7 so I could create a dual-boot system running Windows ME and Mandrake 8.2 ( I was forced to live with Mistake Edition for about a year and a half before upgrading to XP). During the following years, I added a few more upgrades before I built a new PC from the ground up in 2004, only to sell it about six months later to finance my first Mac, a 900MHz G3 iBook running Jaguar. The Compaq was relegated to a Linux box at that point, and stayed that way until this past fall when I decided to install XP so I could have a backup system if anything were to happen to my MacBook Pro.

Apparently the timing was right. In the end of October, the keyboard and trackpad stopped responding on my MBP. After about an hour on the phone with three people at AppleCare, Apple decided they would send me a new MBP. So I sent the old one back, received the new one, and all was well. For two and a half months. At the beginning of February, the same issue surfaced in the new one. The same day I planned on heading up to the Apple Store in San Jose, the Compaq died. After five minutes on the phone, my dad agreed to finance the rebuild, and I was off to San Jose with my shopping list for a stop at Fry’s.

Going Shopping

My original list was comprised of four main components.

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz)
• RAM: G.Skill 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM
• Storage: 2 x Segate Barracuda 250GB SATA drives

Arriving at Fry’s, I discovered that I wasn’t going to be able to fit all of these into the budget my dad agreed on, so I started searching over their selection. With my iPhone pointed to Newegg so I could check on reviews, I made my final selection.

• Motherboard: ASUS P5GC-MX/1333
• Processor: Intel Pentium Duo E2140 (1.6GHz)
• Memory: Kingston 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM

I decided to go without buying new drives for the time being, instead salvaging the original 30GB drive (the 80GB died about six months ago). Seeing as this box is going to be a backup/secondary machine, I don’t need all the extra storage at the moment.

Building

Upon arriving back in Santa Cruz, I immediately began the process of removing and cleaning the old components. Installing the new hardware was a breeze, but I ran into a problem when I tried powering up the system. Perhaps it’s due to the computer originally being an AMD machine, but the harness containing the wires for the power button and status LED’s on the front panel was wired differently than the front panel header on the motherboard. This required an additional 30 minutes of figuring out what wires went where, whether they carried positive or negative currents, then rewiring the header harness. All said and done, I had a clean and working box in about two hours.

Software

Because I don’t run Windows on my Mac yet I find a need for it at times, I decided to go with Windows XP for the OS. I was debating whether or not to run Vista, but decided it wasn’t worth it. After another hour, XP Pro was freshly installed.

Drivers and Configuration

Like every other motherboard you can buy in a store, ASUS provided a CD containing all the drivers I needed to get everything working. Except for the built-in gigabit LAN. This wasn’t a big problem for me, as I had also installed a D-Link WDA-1320 wireless PCI card. Even with the wireless card, I spent an hour trying to debug the built-in LAN port, but eventually gave up after trying four different driver versions from ASUS’s downloads site.

After some software updates, restarts, and installation of other software (Kaspersky Anti-virus, Microsoft Office, etc.), the build was officially complete. I then began to tweak the BIOS settings, seeing just how far I could push this hardware. After some trial-and-error, I got the processor to run comfortably at 2.4GHz without sacrificing much in terms of temperature.

Final Thoughts

I’ve been using the machine a couple times a week for the past two months. Overall, I am quite satisfied with how the build turned out. I’ve encountered a few issues with the built-in graphics chipset, Intel’s GMA-950, which probably isn’t the best engine to drive my 24″ Dell display. Graphics and video can be choppy, and pixels are occasionally left on screen after I close or move a window. If I had a graphics card that offered DVI output, I don’t think there would be any issues.

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