My Upgrade This Year
Spring Computer Blog
My Newest
Homebuilt Computer - 2003
Athlon XP 2600+ (2.8 GHz) with 333MHz FSB / DDR PC-2700 memory
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Front |
Side with room lights on |
Side with room dark |
The Components:
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet Added Rounded IDE cables
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RAM:
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Network Switch SpeedStream 8 port switch |
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Video Card: |
DVD ROM
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Hard Drive:
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CD R-RW 52x 24x 52x LG CD Re-Writer GCE-8520B
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Antec True Blue 480w PSU |
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Cold Cathode Light |
(These pictures were of me assembling my old K6-2/450 system in 1999)
The techmom at work.
Having a
blast!
Annual Upgrades |
2003 - And again! Just after Mother's Day in time for my
Summer college classes! All of my air-flow and thermal problems are fixed now! Praise the Lord!
Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra (Black) motherboard, AMD Athlon 2600+ CPU, Antec Plusview 1000AMG case, Antec TrueBlue 480 PSU. Sweet! |
2002 - They did it again! In time for Mother's day. All new upgrades! What a family! I guess I did need something faster after all. LOL My oldest son who is in the U.S. Army bought me a laptop for my birthday. My family is sure good to me! |
2001-This year was another great birthday year
for me! My family paid for all the parts I needed to build my long awaited Athlon
Thunderbird
P.C.! (Since I was so anxious they got the stuff for me a month early. I got
to get it going for Mother's Day.) It is a wonderful system! Thank you
everyone! My old AMD K6-2/450 was outdated by today's standard and now, once
again my system is up to date. Until software catches up I don't know why on
earth I would need anything faster! -------Sheri |
Here is a link to an excellent article on |
How I Built My Latest System After I reformatted my hard drive I began the hardware rebuilding.
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History of My Home
Built computers |
Why I Built My Own Computer |
Why build your own computer? My reasons were pretty simple. After buying my first Pentium 100 computer in 1996, I didn't have the money to go buy another one when the 100Mhz systems were out of date. I decided to buy one upgrade at a time so that I could keep using my computer and eventually get it updated enough to suit my needs. That first computer of mine locked up all the time when I was on the Internet. It only had 8MB of RAM and 1GB hard drive and a 14.4kbps modem. It is always easier for me to come up with a little money at a time rather than try to save up a big amount. You can buy a computer right off the shelf cheaper, but you need to pay for it all at once, and you don't get the high quality components that you do when you buy them one at a time. My first upgrade was to add more RAM and a faster modem. My PowerSpec 100Mhz came with a combination sound card / modem and only 8MB of RAM. When I took it to the store and paid to have it upgraded they told me that I had to buy another combo card to upgrade it. I really wanted a faster modem, and not knowing any better I told them to go ahead. They had problem after problem with that combo card. They finally thought that they had it fixed and I was able to use it for a couple of weeks. Suddenly the modem just died on it. No one at the store knew why. They decided that the card was bad and tried to replace it. I had been talking to a Christian tech friend that I met on the Internet. He told me to get rid of that combo card. I asked the store if I couldn't just get a separate sound card and modem for it instead of the combo card. I mentioned that with what I had to pay for that combo card I should be able to replace it with two separate cards. They did some checking with management and it was approved. Finally my system was fixed and up and running again. My next upgrade was the video card. My original card came with 1MB of video RAM so it was just not up to the speed of the day. I bought a Matrox Mystique 4MB SGRAM card and it improved everything quite a lot. I now had 24MB of RAM a Sound Blaster 16 value sound card, a USR Sportster 33.6 modem, and the Matrox Mystique video card. I thought I had quite the machine! :-) Computers have come a long way since then! My church's youth pastor helped me do my next upgrades. He totally rebuilt my computer for me and as I watched he explained everything that he did. That was all that I needed to learn to do my own upgrades. I decided that from then on that I could do these things myself. I have since rebuilt my computer completely with new cases, motherboards, CPUs and the works, four times, and have built my hubby and a son new computers as well. |
Hubby's new system specs: | |
MSI KT3 motherboard with AMD Athlon XP 1800+
(1.53GHZ) and 256MB DDR 2700 (333.3MHz) memory eVGA GeForce 2MX 400 64MB video memory 4X AGP Sound Blaster PCI 512 D-Link 10/100 NIC Maxtor 7200 ATA-100 30GB hard drive This computer is really fast!
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June 2002 - birthday 2002: Not only got the parts to
upgrade my computer, but my sweet grown up soldier son, who was serving in Korea
at the time, got me a new laptop for my birthday! What a birthday present! :-) Compaq 725US AMD Mobile Athlon 4 1600+, 256MB SDRAM, DVD ROM / CD-RW combo.
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September 2002 - New digital camera. Olympus C-720 8X Optical zoom 3X digital zoom (24X total zoom) 3.0 megapixel - I needed a good zoom lens for taking pictures of my boys high school football games. Sitting way up in the stands requires good zoom to be able to take pictures. This camera does have good zoom. |
May 2003 - Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra (Black) motherboard, AMD Athlon 2600+ CPU, Antec Plusview 1000AMG case, Antec TrueBlue 480 PSU. Sweet! | |
I gave the LInux box to Joe for his
birthday. :-) Now it is a Win98 box again
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Got another Linux box to play with
for a while :-) One of my sons gave me his old AMD K6-2/300 computer so I loaded Linux Mandrake 9.0 on it. It is a neat OS to play with but I still haven't succeeded in building and installing the latest Nvidia drivers for the GeForce 2MX video card in it. I'll get it eventually! :-) I'll have to either install new sound drivers for the Aureal chip, or pop a different sound card in it to get sound.
September 2003 - Gave the new Linux box to Jeremy, Josiah and Jared. Now it is a Windows 98 computer again. All of their favorite children's games were Windows games so... -and it works better with the home network. |