Most annoying upgrade ever :(

Nuvo

Hello.
As you may or may not know, I hate my computer somewhat.
I hated it simply because:
It's a HP PC (I had this bought for me, I was planning to build my own).
It has the XP vir... erm OS :P
My WiFi refuses to work under linux no matter what I do, which sucks for getting linux online (I can get the stupid thing to wake up under knoppix and other distro's, but it won't even scan for a network :[).
My HDD is tiny (just scraping in at 40GB).
My GPU is an integrated intel extreme 64MB which doesn't support T&L and which sucks RAM from the rest of my PC, thus making it crawl like nothing else on Earth.

I did look into buying a new iMac (intel), but decided that for what I actually use my PC for, I could better utilise the money (nearly £1000) by buying components over a set amount of time to build up a system that could run well and get linux online without losing the ability to start up windows if needed.
First up, the graphics card. I figured that if the GPU is leeching off of my main RAM reserves, it's one of the main reasons for the slowness, so I set off to PC World (yes, I know, ARGH!) to purchase a suitable AGP replacement with about 128MB of RAM (enough to run Civ 4).
What I got was a 256MB AGP x8 GeForce FX 5500, which may not be great for gamers, but I only intended to speed my PC up a bit, and at less than £60, I wasn't about to complain (side note, I didn't get bugged once in pc world).
First things first, boot up and disable the on board GPU, simple enough under XP (controll panel > hardware device manager > disable this).
Then just pop off the side by loosening the thumb screws and pulling and remove the back plate so you can get at the VGA, DVI and S-Video connections when you put it all together again, simple... right?
Here's where things got horribly, horribly, not simple...
Because of the way that the PC was put together, my HDD was mounted, not in a 3.5 drive bay, but screwed vertically down the front of the casew behind the power button and as the power connections of the cabling were a wee bit short, I had to re-mount it closer to my DVD drive so it'd use a spare one, leaving me enough cable to reach my new graphics card.
And so, I though I'd shunt my Floppy drive down one and whack my HDD in it's place... WRONG!! It turned out that both 3.5" bays were completely different, so |I couldn't mount my FDD in the other one, or get my HDD mounted right either, so I had to take it all to bits again and fiddle some more.
The only viable sollution to this was to re-mount my DVD drive lower and mount my HDD where I was planning to mount my FDD so I could connect it all up.
Luckily this worked perfectly and my system runs faster now, if a little louder due to the extra fan, but that's only after removing the entire outer casing of my PC (both sides and even the face plate just to take out a HDD) and tuning the screen resolution and such as XP sucks at this (it put me on the lowest res and I had to retune my monitor after fixing this too).
Moral of this story: Do NOT try upgrading a HP PC, build your own if you can.
Tools used: double ended screw driver, normal cross head screwdriver, cable cutters.
To do: RAM, HDD, case, possibly new mobo and CPU (though 2.5Ghz still gets the job done for me).

CannonBallGuy

First, I apologise for not reading that all. I have left all my ICT Coursework to the day before the deadline - again...
But I would like to point out that a 40GB HDD is hardly a reason to get a new machine.
I only have 30GB and have had this iBook for over 11 months.
I only had to start moving stuff to an External a few days ago when I installed iLife '06.
You must be wasting your space. :P
Maybe you could delete some of those... movies...
Or, maybe Win just takes up loads of memory

Nuvo

40GB is enough for a few things, but I have a number of development tools installed and the drive has partitions for both XP and Linux.
I don't want to remove Linux as I prefer it to windows, but at the same time, some of the software I use will not run correctly, if at all under linux using Wine.
XP takes up something like 3GB of space for a full install if I'm not mistaken.
I'm not buying a new PC, I'm simply upgrading the one I have in order to keep it running well.
A larger HDD running along side my current one would allow me to have more space and to have a cross platform drive (FAT32) which linux could write to (linux can read NTFS, but that's it).
To say I'm wasting space may be somewhat inaccurate when some applications can take up over 1GB under windows and I do compress things when I can.
The HDD issue wasn't the main problem though, it was the fact that the PC ran incredibly slow on startup and after long periods of use, it strarted dying again

danielneri

what did you use to partition your drives

Nuvo

I started off with a 100% NTFS drive and then used a shareware tool called Bootit NG to reduce the size of the NTFS partition so that whatever linux distro I used would have space to install itself without damaging the XP NTFS partition.
My PC got messed up by SuSE at one point and caused an error to pop up when I used XP, but I managed to fix that and XP seemed to work fine appart from that when it did happen

Python

For partitioning your drives I recommend using Partition Magic... Best program Ive ever used for it.. its not free though

Nuvo

Well, I can't say Biitit NG has ever failed me.
I've carried out the same XP resizing operation on 2 different Seagate HDD's and had no problems and I have removed and tweaked other partitions with it as well.
The full version also acts as a boot loader, so it can be used instead of lilo, grub and so on.