Most of you know how to do this, many of you probably do this regularly, but this is for the benefit of the curious and the easily amused.
Let us begin.
You
ugly.
Pop the case off, and examine the internals. We've got an old SiS motherboard (I hate these) in an old, cheaply made case. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it- stronger, better, faster.
Ground yourself by touching the power supply. This is a no-brainer.
Then remove the FCC class 5 interference device.
Let's get that old PSU out of there. 250 watts, made in 2002, and generic? Must have been a non-lemon, but it runs noisy, and doesn't pump enough juice. Removing it is simple- the screws are on the back of the case. Be careful not to smash it into the motherboard on removal. You might want to deploy an advanced strategy known as 'thinking ahead' and remove it after the motherboard if you're pulling both. Ahem. Moving on.
Done.
Making a little extra room here, the cables were in the way.
Almost ready.
Unscrew the screws holding the motherboard to the internal board, and Tada.
Now we violently pry the old fascia for the ports out. With older cases, and even some newer ones, you should go into this with the same mentality as a knife fight: you will get cut, accept it.
And push the new fascia which came with your motherboard. Make sure it pops in firmly, and before you do it, bend all the little metal tabs out of the way of the port-boxes. Test it against the motherboard before inserting.
Now go get a bandaid or piece of shrinkwrap so you don't bleed over everything.
Half of them were these little plastic standoffs. It took me a second to pop the motherboard off them, but once I figured them out, I love them. No chance of a short circuit AND easy on/off.
For the others, I used screws with rubber grommets. It's a habit and it gives me peace of mind, even though new motherboards have sufficient protection around screwholes. FYI you will probably have little brass standoff screws between the internal plate and the motherboard, which are what these screws attach to. It was half and half brass standoffs / plastics. Get that mofo in firm but not overtight.
Let's slip the new PSU in.
Very good.
Hello there hot 64bit mamma!
It doesn't come with thermal paste, but I was prepared.
Follow the instructions for adding the processor, and for god's sake don't force it. I like how it feels heavy in your hand just before you lower it into the holes, and it flawlessly fits.
Put a grain-of-rice sized blob of thermal paste onto the processor, and spread it evenly with a razorblade. I couldn't find one, so I used the (lethal) edge of the old port fascia. It worked perfectly.
Follow the instructions for adding the heatsink. Once you're sure that you aren't doing anything wrong, use force as is necessary. Those things attach
tight.
Black cable = correct. Beige cable = incorrect.
I don't cut my cables or buy overpriced pre-sliced and round bundled cables. I just fold them, like origami. Also note the removed floppy drive and old HDD. They both get added back in at the end, but for now I don't need to bother with them. Phooey on western digital- samsung is where it's at.
Bad picture of a great HDD.
Fiddle around with the cables you get with the PSU, after attaching the two to the motherboard. This is textbook perfect, as all of the outlets on each line I used are going to be occupied with no danglers. (For the bottom, two hard drives and a floppy end) Maximum efficiency. The rest are flipped out of the way and will be stuffed somewhere convenient.
Now, we've spent maybe ten minutes at the most doing that, and that doesn't translate into any decent per-hour labor fee, so let's play games, then write a post on APS while running up the clock until we're at an appropriate time figure. Say, two hours of hard work sounds appropriate
.
Now go plug in the rest of the cables, set the jumpers on the new disk, power it up, ghost on XP Pro, set the old HDD in as a slave + backup disk, and call it done.
Edit: I left out the installation of an old Geforce4MX that was kicking around, or popping in the stick of RAM, but those aren't terribly challenging.
