Re: Play Want Bin Patrick's Day Edition

On 17 Mar 2008 13:07:46 GMT, Chris Whitworth <usenet.chris@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On 2008-03-17, Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 17 Mar 2008 11:58:13 GMT, Chris Whitworth <usenet.chris@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Trying to decipher to PC hardware market - This is a royal pain. The northbridge
fan on my desktop machine has been making distinctly unhappy about-to-fail
noises, so after a day or so of trying to find out how to get replacements and
fit them, I decided it might be time instead to replace the entire motherboard/
CPU/RAM for something a bit spanglier.

Save yourself the pain and just buy a replacement heatsink+fan, Zalman
and many others make them.

Yeah, but getting the old heatsink/fan off looks like a royal pain in the
ass - it necessitates removing the mobo (which means dismantling the entire
machine) and has a high "scraping across the circuit board with a pair of
needle-nosed pliers" probability quotient.

I've only had trouble with ones that were glued on, m'self. If you're
thinking of a new build you shirley aren't cack-handed enough to be
worried about scraping? Use pincer snips on the plastic pop-rivets
instead if you are.

Add into this the fact that it's a S939 motherboard and thus nearly impossible
to upgrade beyond it's somewhat pokey Athlon 64 3200 now, I think replacing
the whole lot might not be such a bad option. Cost isn't a /massive/ issue, and
it's fairly important that this machine "just works" more-or-less 24/7 so it
seems like a sensible option.

It'd only be £400quid for a good solid rebuild, but it was the time
you were objecting to and building+setting up a new machine will
likely take longer. A 3GHz A64 can't be considered pokey, either - new
machines will be a bit faster, but most of the apparent speed will be
down to the fresh Windows install.

Nope. Change mobo, and you're almost guaranteed to need to reinstall
Windows.

Most of the guides suggest doing a "repair" install to force a redetect of the
chipset drivers. To be honest, I've got getting on for 750GB of unused storage
so I may as well back everything up onto that and then just reinstall.

To acknowledge the folks who've posted "Well, mine worked without a
reinstall", I've done the same - but always with niggles. I was dead
impressed when going from an Athlon 2500xp machine to a dual Xeon
server board booted up the same Windows installation - until I
discovered that the USB was intensely flaky. A clean reinstall doubled
the apparent speed of the machine, as well as fixing the niggles.

Cheers - Jaimie (Just get a Mac Pro, you know you want to!)

A Mac is, frankly, the last thing I want, given the amount of money I've
thrown at Windows-only software over the years.

They're the best Windows boxes around!

Cheers - Jaimie
--
I have seen the fuschia, and it's ... er ... sort of pink and mauve
with bits hanging out. -- Richard Robinson, urs
.

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