How to Upgrade your PC

Your PC may be getting long in the tooth but that doesn't mean you need to pay lots of cash for a new one. A mid-life kick may be all your current one needs

The Patient

A rather elderly Pentium 120 with 48Mb RAM, a 2Gb hard disk and a basic ISA based ATI graphics card. The case says Escom, which shows its vintage - around 1996.

Maybe I should remove that Intel Inside sticker now?

Having been quite the mean machine in its day, this PC is now looking a bit of a duffer. It has only been used for word processing and light home-finance duties of late so the lack of grunt hasn't been a problem. However, the owner (my wife) is starting to hanker after playing Theme Park World which requires an altogether beefier PC. What can be done?

The plan

The motherboard on this machine can only handle CPUs up to 133Mhz so a new one plus a faster CPU is needed. The existing CDROM drive is a quad-speed which is good enough and the 2Gb hard disk will do as a starting point so that can be re-used too. The motherboard has onboard sound so when the new one is purchased, a sound card will also be needed.

Back it Up

Before I got any further, I took a full backup of all the important data and files from the machine. This is vitally important as if anything goes wrong you may never get to see your precious files again.

Shopping - Real and Virtual

A quick look at various vendors showed that my choices were somewhat limited by the AT standard case size. I ended up opting for a Gigabyte GA-5XX and AMD K6/2 500Mhz CPU from Dabs (www.dabs.co.uk). The AMD isn't as good as the Intel equivalents at floating point maths operations but in terms of bang for the buck it's pretty much unbeatable. These two cost about £100 which wasn't a bad start.

I am lucky in having an excellent local PC shop owner who happily buys, sells and swaps second hand kit. A quick trip and some serious haggling turned some old games, sundry bits of software and the ATI graphics card into a 64Mb DIMM, a 4Mb AGP no-name graphics card plus a Yamaha based sound card for £40.

Pull it Apart, Stuff it All Back Again

Now the serious PC rebuild could begin. Whenever you work on a PC, it is a good idea to ensure you are well earthed. If you start fiddling with delicate electronics, the static charges you build up just walking around can easily damage chips. Maplins and other such shops sell wrist straps with wires attached that you can clip on to an earthed piece of metal, something like a radiator.

Suitably wired, I opened the case and started to remove the various items. Changing a motherboard is quite a task and it required a bit of case dismantling to get the old one out. At this point I discovered the existing CPU fan had long since died in a mass of fluff and gunk. A new one would be needed before the new CPU was started. Back in the 120Mhz days you could get away with no fan if you were lucky. Modern fast CPUs absolutely need a fan to keep cool. Maplins had a suitable chunky fan at £10. A bit steep for a fan but time was of the essence.

The new motherboard went in fine. I added the CPU, fan, memory and AGP graphics card. Next up was to set the various jumpers on the motherboard to suit an AMD K6/2 500. Now it was time to switch on to test that all was well. Alas, it was most definitely not well. Not even a beep. Dead as a dodo. I checked the jumper settings on the motherboard to ensure they were correctly set for the CPU, looked for loose connections and generally scratched my head. Eventually I discovered that despite both motherboards being AT standard layouts, the old one had a screw mounting where the new one had the memory mounted and the connection was shorting out the motherboard. Had I killed it? Happily not. Some insulation was added under the motherboard to protect it from the metal mounting point before powering on again. The machine fired up. Time for tea.

The sound card, hard drive and CDROM were all added. I had a spare 1.5Gb hard disk so this was also put in to boost the storage a little.

As the data had been backed up, the decision was made to wipe the machine. It is possible to change the motherboard then rely on Windows to sort out any new drivers but its best to start anew if you can. I used a bootable version of Windows 98 on CDROM to wipe the machine and install a fresh copy of Windows. To ensure everything was up to date I connected to the Internet and downloaded all the Windows 98 patches and updated drivers.

The machine was now fully operational so it was time to start re-installing the software and restoring the backed up data. This went without any hitches and once done, the machine was ready to use.

Faster, Faster!

As well as a fast processor. Theme Park World also needs a decent graphics card so I started to wonder if the 4Mb AGP card was good enough. A friend mentioned he had a spare Voodoo II I could have so that went in too (thanks Richard!).

So far, through some careful recycling, use of local shops and a generous friend I had managed to do the whole upgrade for £150. That had taken the machine from a P120 with 48Mb RAM and a 2Gb hard disk to a K6-2/500 with 64Mb RAM, a Voodoo II, 3.5Gb of HD and a reasonable sound card.

All that was left was to take the old bits back to the shop to see what I could get. More haggling and the old CPU, motherboard and RAM turned into a copy of Theme Park World. Not a bad deal.

Aftermath

I can happily report that the upgraded PC plays Theme Park World. It isn't the fastest thing on Earth but for £150, who's complaining? I have also installed The Sims and that plays fine too. For day to day use, the machine whizzes through its old tasks at such a rate as to make my wife wonder why she didn't upgrade before. A bonus has been the inclusion of USB on the new board which will help when adding further peripherals. Overall, despite a few issues during the build, the project has been a success!

 

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com