I did some upgrades to my old Dell this past weekend, and thought it was worth sharing what I learned. If you know me, you also know I usually research things to death. With that said, for days I went to every forum I could find, manufacturer's sites, and the usual tech sites, to find out as much as possible about my machine and the hardware that's compatible. My issue was the thing just seems to run slow. After the normal sludge removal, it was still a little slow in changing apps and such. I made a HUGE mistake when I got this thing of not buying a ton of RAM, so that was the major issue. The other was my 4 year old hard drive. It's been great, but it never shuts off, so who knows how much life is left. That and it's getting pretty friggin' full. Through all the reading of "computer expert" posts I found a few things:
- No matter what you own, it's a piece of crap unless you built it yourself
- Your stock power unit is way too small
- You got ripped off
- Michael Dell is Satan
- LT's driver Vijay from Bangalore is missing because he works at Fry's. He's a better driver than a computer person.
And you know what, the "experts" are wrong. I love my Dell. It's been a great machine and would recommend them to anyone that cannot, or could care less about, building their own. I will build my next computer because in the long run it's cheaper, and because any prebuilt machine is going to be somewhat proprietary and harder to upgrade. But for 99.9% of the users out there, that's ok because you will never have a reason to crack that case and change a thing. What I ran into was talking to some pretty smart people that thought anyone that bought a machine off the shelf wasn't really serious about this whole computer thingy. The above bullet points are of course tongue in cheek, so here's what the overwhelming majority of people felt was true, and what turned out to be reality. I share this in case someone really wants to upgrade their computer and can't get a straight answer:
- The PSU isn't powerful enough. Long story made short, Dell rates their power units at mean, not peak. By the way, most of the industry rates their PSU's at peak, the stock Dell is 250W mean and 345W peak. Not too shabby.
- RDRAM sucks. It doesn't suck, but it's pricey.
- Parallel ATA is bad. Well, it works perfect for what I need, however it's getting hard to find PATA drives.
- My BIOS won't handle over 127G storage. It's true, but it can be fixed. I just don't need that much C drive to chance the change in a BIOS upgrade, because sometimes the upgrade doesn't work.
- You can't get a decent video card for under $300. I found one that is about as fast as my unit will run for just over $100. 256mb to boot.
- Dell PSU's are sometimes wired backwards. Sometimes this is true, so be careful. It looks like a normal ATX but some of the wires are crossed that can burn up the motherboard. Mine seems to be industry standard, but I'm on the edge of when Dell finally switched back.
If you want model numbers, etc, e-mail me. For comparison, here's what's running right this second, upgrades are in
red:
- Dell Dimension 8200
- 1.8G Intel P4 400mhz FSB (850 Williamette chipset)
- Seagate PATA/100 250G hard drive 7200 RPM 8M cache (boot drive) partitioned to 127G and 104G
- Maxtor PATA/100 40G 2M cache hard drive 7200 RPM
- 1.25G RDRAM PC800 (1G upgrade)
- NVidia GeForce FX 5500 video card, 256M onboard RAM and cooling fan on a 4X AGP
- Samsung DVD-ROM
- NEC CDRW (soon to be switched with an NEC DVD dual layer RW to save power and not use the LaCie external firewire)
- 3.5 floppy
- HP deskjet
- iPod
In conclusion, with the exception of the RAM, everything was relatively cheap. It's certainly not smokin' hot, but will get me down the road a few more years and play most games, even if some are at lower settings. If you have an older machine (5 years or less), there is hope. Unless you are a fairly serious gamer it will be fine. Most of you were probably smart enough to get enough RAM in the first place, and hard drive storage is running around 40 cents a gig, so that's cheap. I did find an upgraded PSU, but the NEC DVD RW was cheaper and still solves the same potential power issue. When I do build a new machine, I have no idea what I will use since the entire technical landscape will be different. I know I will go for a large, well ventilated case (I can't wait to overclock). Also at least 1000mghz of FSB on the mobo (a lesson from Apple). And everything else is now industry standard and easily interchangeable. We'll see how it goes next year. After I put it together, I will either have an easily upgradeable machine or a fire claim on the insurance.
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