A question about hard drives

E

eagleandhawk

New Member
i have a question about hard drives. i have an old Dell Dimension 2400, and I want to upgrade the hard drive from 35 gb to 160 gb and I went to a store today to see what they had and the prices. so they only had one kind, it's 160 gb SATA. well that was all i remembered. so my question is this: will it be compatible? i looked in the owner's manual, and it didn't say anything, but i'm afraid at the time of the book's printing, the SATA thing wasn't popular or around yet. help of any kind would be really appreciated.
 
How about a Welcome to the Computer Forum! http://www.computerforum.com/70672-official-welcome-thread.html and a reminder to new members to review the http://www.computerforum.com/52038-forum-rules.html

The documentation on the Dimension 2400 series shows only one ide type drive will work. You can see the information at http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2400/en/sm_en/specs.htm There are no sata ports apparently for the boards used on the older models there. This is rather typical of older prebuilt systems.

A 160gb EIDE type not sata would go right in for increasing hard drive capacity there. If you can't order online another store will likely carry a larger ide type drive you can use. Newer prebuilt systems as well as boards for custom built cases are now seeing the large trend for using sata type drives to replace the ide type.

The majority of those will see only one instead of the usual two ide channels for adding more then one or two hard drives or having more then one optical type(cd/dvd) drive installed.
 
Yes, but it looks like any video card would have to be PCI (not PCI Express). It doesn't say there is an AGP port.
 
The specifications show an integrated video chip telling that story well there. Dell and other older prebuilds often see onboard rather then offering more with an AGP port unfortunately. HP now seems to regularly use Asus boards that offer more support for sata and PCI-Express when you look at new systems. Dell also had to make some adjustments on their part.

On the older model there finding a good pci type video card and disabling the onboard video would be an improvement for you there. You can find several lower cost sound cards that will go right in on the next slot available. Are you running XP now or plan to upgrade to Vista? For XP you can select some older model sound cards for under $40 even less at this time.
 
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