Family Photo Album

Jim's New PC

The unplanned upgrade was of my disk drives. The 9GB Quantum Ultra2 drive that held my operating system and my digital photo archive failed completely and without warning just a couple of weeks before the new CPU and motherboard arrived. I had already bought a new SCSI-160 controller card for the new machine, so when I replaced the failed drive, I bought a matching SCSI-160 disk drive: an 18BG Seagate I also bought a new 40GB Western Digital ATA/100 disk drive to use for live (as opposed to 8mm tape) backups. I also kept the 20GB Western Digital that was already part of the system, but retired the old 4.3GB SCSI/Ultra disk drive. I now have 2 EIDE drives and one SCSI drive totalling almost 80GB.

The last upgrade, also unplanned, was a new Prophet II 2D/3D video card; it's an nVidia GeForce II/MX card with 32MB of SDRAM. I had planned to continue using my faithful old Canopus Pure3D/6MB card - one of the original generation of voodoo graphics cards - but apparently it couldn't handle the speed of the new computer, and would lock up almost every time I used it.

	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 4:47 PM Here's the new motherboard: an Abit KT7A, with the 266MHz front-side bus. Three memory DIMMs, six PCI slots and one ISA slot (that ISA slot saved me a few bucks by using my old sound card).
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 5:43 PM First power-up. No point in putting the whole thing together only to discover a motherboard problem, so I mounted it temporarily to the mobo rack out, plugged in an old video card, connected power, monitor, and keyboard, then tried to power on. It worked! This PC case is one I bought to put Wendy's PC into; we borrowed it just for the powerup test.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 6:20 PM Here's the old case laid out on my study floor for disassembly. I've already taken the top and sides off and I'm about to start pulling stuff loose. That oblong black rectangle to the left center of the photo is the Pentium II CPU.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 6:29 PM Now I've pulled all the cards out and disconnected the cables and power hookups.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 6:31 PM Finally, the motherboard rack and the disk drive cage come out. All the upper components can stay for now.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 6:33 PM The motherboards laid out for comparison. At the top is the new Abit board, to the bottom is the old Asus board.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 7:07 PM Time for some spring cleaning. When I saw how much dust had accumulated inside my old case, I took out the remaining components, took the case out front, and blew it clean with compressed air. I even used the needle attachment to blow dust out of the innards of the power supply.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 8:08 PM Athlon CPUs generate a lot of heat, so I'm adding fans to the case to attempt to move more air through. This fan goes into the bottom front, blowing in.
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 8:40 PM This fan goes at the top rear, blowing out. (These fans didn't turn out to be enough to keep the case cool: I can't run with the cover on, at full CPU load, without overheating.)
	Wednesday March 21, 2001, 9:37 PM The new motherboad has now been mounted on its mobo rack and populated with cards. You're supposed to be able to slide this entire rack into the back of the PC case, but the old ISA card turns out to be too tall; it had to be removed, then reinstalled after the rack was in place.
	Thursday March 29, 2001, 7:32 PM Time warp: about one week later, I replaced the fan that cools the CPU. On the left is the old fan, on the right the new. This is one of the fans from AMD's list of recommended cooling solutions, with the prescribed phase-change thermal compound for a good thermal bond to the heat sink.
	Thursday March 29, 2001, 7:40 PM To install the new heat sink, I had to clean all the old thermal compound off the CPU. This gave me a chance to verify that I got what I'd paid for: the 1200 in the CPU part number indicates 1200 MHz (1.2 GHz), and the following 'A' indicates the 266 MHz front-side bus.
	Thursday March 29, 2001, 7:47 PM The mobo rack with the new heat sink and fan installed. I've taken out the ISA sound card so the rack will fit through the opening in the back of the PC case.
	Thursday March 29, 2001, 7:49 PM Final reassembly: sliding the mobo rack back into the case.