Upgrade and or new build

R

RoR

New Member
Hi.

I have had the same old slow computer for a few years and have been promising myself that i would save for a better pc for nearly as long. However recently its performance is extremely poor to the point it has become unbearable.

I have recently been given somebody else's old desktop pc which they have replaced. It is and was faulty and does not send a signal to my monitor ,after troubleshooting this fault for my whole day off work i came to the conclusion that it has either a motherboard/cpu or video card fault.

I reached this conclusion after following a number of troubleshooting manuals and reading a number of forums relating to this issue. Although my diagnosis may and probably is wrong i am not a total noob as i have been studying to become a A+ technician for a couple of months.

More to the point:
I now have decided that i must build a new computer immediately however i have a small budget of £250 = $420. The PC will not be used for gaming as i am a console gamer but rather to have 4 or 5 of applications running at the same time which my current pc fails.
Now i understand that i cant get much from this budget however the real question is:
Could i spend my budget on a cpu, motherboard, Ram and use my existing harddrive(s), fan(s), cases and PSU's, cd-roms, dvd RW's and upgrade these at some later point when i got more money to spend?

Anyway i will leave you a list of the hardware i could keep for the short term from the two crappy pc's.

200GB/Western Digital Caviar Sata HD
80GB/7200 Samsung IDE HD
CD/DVD Re-writer drive
Floppy Disk Drive
Akasa CPU Fan

Any advice will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

EDIT

Since writing this i went ahead and bought:
ASUS P5QL-Pro,
Intel® Core™2 Quad Q8200 Quad Core 4x2.33GHz 4MB Cache,
Samsung 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz

Figure i will use one of the cases i already have which has good ventilation one big fan, use the 200gb sata hd until can afford upgrade, use dvd/cd re-writer i have and use the integrated graphix until i have some money spare after buying new hd.

The only thing im unsure of is if one of the psu's i have currently will be sufficient for the new hardware? Any advice, thoughts and opinions will greatly be appreciated!! :D
 
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That plan would be fine, except the board you've chosen has no integrated video.

Most any PSU would work as long as it has a 20+4 power output, which is
what that board requires.

Also, the board is ATX so getting it to fit an OEM case may or may not be an issue.
 
Yeah, that's usually your best bet. Using old cd-rom drives and even an old HDD. You can try your old power supply and if it doesn't work. Go onto newegg.com and find powersupply and click best rating and then look for the cheapest one on the first few pages and you should be good to go.
 
LOL!!
Yeah i have just realized there is no integrated graphics, oops!!

I am not a pc gamer however i do dabble a little with photo and video editing and the price i would preferably pay for a video card would be a max of £60 = $100, any advice at which particular cards i should buy?

The PSU info is here = LINK. Would this be suitable with the ASUS P5QL-Pro?

Thanks in advance :D
 
Ok.

So i went out and bought a pny 9600gt overclocked and built the pc.
I powered it up but got no display and no boot-up beeps.

I was running a 350W PSU and the motherboard states it should be a minimum of 400W.
So i then went and bought a 650W PSU installed for the same problem to occur.

I've looked around the net but cannot seem to find any decent troubleshooting guides for this problem if anybody could help me i would extremely greatful as im now starting to fear the worst! :(
 
OK forget that last post... my gfx card was'nt plugged in properly.

Ok so now the computer displays and i can get to bios....

However the current install of xp on the hd did not work when in the old pc and neither in the new build. The PC basically just restarts when attempting to load windows.

So i decided to re-install windows xp and booted from the xp disk. At the start of set-up it comes up with "analysing hd......" and this screen just freezes.

Anybody know why this would happen? How i could possibly solve this, i thought it could be a failed hd but dont want to buy another if this is not the fault.
 
RoR said:
Anybody know why this would happen? How i could possibly solve this, i thought it could be a failed hd but dont want to buy another if this is not the fault.
Click to expand...

This is just a guess - but could it be because your Windows copy is an OEM - and OEM only works on 1 PC?

You could always try and download Windows 7 RC and see if that works? It's still available for download until Aug 20th.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/download.aspx
 
No the copy of xp is not oem, but thanks for the suggestion anyway.

I am planning on installing windows 7.... once this pc boots and i have access to the dvd-rw on the system. lol!
 
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