Upgrading the Friend

This weekend I was asked to take a look at my friend’s computer. He doesn’t know much at all about computers other than that he likeds to play command and conquer and download music. He was curious about his options for upgrading his hardware. The following are is existing specs.

HP Pavillion Tower

350watt Power Supply

AMD XP 3000+

1GB of Ram PC333 (64MB Shared for Onboard Video) Only 2 slots

Integrated Graphics (64MB Shared) with AGP Slot Available

DVD-ROM – Not functional

CDRW – speed unknown (52×32x52?)

 

So not a whole lot to work with. Fortunately he doesn’t expect a whole lot from his computer. Unfortunately he’s not looking to spend a bunch of money on something he doesn’t expect a whole lot from. So I tried to come up with an upgrade path for him and cheaply as possible. Here is what I jotted down for him.

Upgrade Video Card – $30 to $100 (He ended up buying one from me for $30)

Upgrade Ram – $46 + shipping for a 2GB (1GB x 2) kit

Upgrade Power Supply – $60 for a 450Watt

Purchase DVDRW drive – $45 for a decent one. Possibly cheaper.

So a total upgrade path of about $180. Not too shabby but not too great either. Considering he’s stuck with a socket 939 mainboard for which you can not get processors for anymore unless you scour craigslist and then all people have are those around the 3000+ range anyway. Also he has AGP which restricts just how far he can take his video performance. All in all for what he expects the computer to do though, these should be fine upgrades.

I ended up selling him an AGP ATI Radeon X1600pro 512MB card. I let it go for $30 which seemed more than fair. That also happens to be one tenth of what I purchased it for about two years ago. I actually feel fortunate that I got anything at all out of it. So I installed the card for him last night. However, it did not have the expected affect on his computer.

One of the reasons he was looking at upgrades was because he loves to play Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2. For whatever reason when he starts up a mission the game gets really choppy. It reminds me of network lag. One second everything is running, the next everything is just sorta paused and you can’t even move the cursor. It’s hard to play an RTS or any game at all like that. I was hoping taking it off the onboard video would help but it didn’t.  Previously I had used MSconfig to remove processes from starting up that weren’t needed. On the plus side though, before coming to me last night, he couldn’t get the game to run at all.

So this one has me stumped. For whatever reason the C&C splash screen will not close when the game launches and the game is choppy as all get out. Correct me if I’m wrong but I though a 2Ghz processor, a gig of ram, and a 512MB video card would be plenty for Red Alert 2. I actually couldn’t get it going with his disc either and ended up reinstalling it with my own disc. It’s a very strange issue. My next suspect is his Window’s Install. I find it to be from a questionable source. It’s something one of his buddy’s hooked him up with. However he has an XP Home COA on the side of his rig so if I can track down an actual Windows CD I am going to do a reinstall for him and see if that smoothes out his performance any. Otherwise I’m sort of at a loss for what is going on with that game. I also lent him Command and Conquer Generals to try out and see if that one will play for him. I guess the next step is to wait and see what he says about that one.

I’ll have to get him to leave it with me for awhile sometime, reload it, and trick it out for him. I have a pretty good feeling that with a fresh install of windows, updated and fresh installed drivers, and some support utilities, that thing could be running smooth and stable. I think all I really need is some time. Nothing can’t be fixed right?

A Small Tweak

 

Sometimes when I get bored at work I log into my Newegg account and look at my order history. I know that seems a little strange but here’s why I do it. I like to look at what I bought a few months ago and see where the prices are. If they are higher or around the same I consider it as a strong purchase. If they are lower, or in the case of my video card, much much lower, I wonder if I shouldn’ve have waited and start looking into upgrade possibilites. The other reason for today’s inquiry specifically was that I was looking for a way to check on the rebate process for my ram that had a $20 mail in rebate. I did find that contact info and sure enough it is being processed.

The other reason why I look at my order history is to look at reviews that people have written since I purchased said hardware. The review section of newegg can contain some hidden gems of information and knowledge from people that really know the hardware inside and out. Not only can that help you with your purchasing decisions, but later on it can help you with setting it up or making sure you get the most out of it as people are quite generous with their system information and settings and particulars like that as well as what they did to get things working a certain way.

In this particular case I was looking at my processor and looking at reviews for it. I noticed it was discontinued so out of curiousity I started looking at other AMD processors to see what it’s replacement item was. Turns out it was the 5400+ X2 Black Box Edition for a very similar price that I paid for my 5000+. However there were no reviews for that product yet. Only this review of someone asking for people to post reviews asking for information pertaining to overclocking the 5400+ and if they felt it was worthwhile to purchase it over the 5000+.

 

So actually in the handful of hours between looking at this post at work and looking at it again to share it with you, two other people had added information to it. Anyways, I took down the information given in the review and as soon as I got home I attempted to change my clock speed to 207mhz, my multiplier to 15.5, and my voltage to 1.425 to see if I could also squeeze 3.2GHz out of my processor stably. Alas, I couldn’t even post at those settings and my bios automatically rebounded for me and made me reset. However it did make me think that perhaps I could nudge them up a touch more than I had them and that is how I ended up at 2.91GHz as shown in the picture above. 110Mhz doesn’t sound like much but over all that means my chip is 310MHz overclocked with only a change to the multiplier. That’s pretty good and even below the median for what people are squeezing out of these chips. Another tidbit I collected out of the reviews on the newegg page for my hardware.

So finally to make my point, newegg reviews steered me toward squeezing the most out of my processor that I bought for bottom dollar. I even stability tested it by running Second Life for several hours and it was rock solid stable. I’m not sure how some of the more extreme games like Supreme Commander are going to handle it but I’ll find that out eventually and I suspect it’s going to be stable. I had never thought to try the 14.5 multiplier setting in my previous exploits for the simple fact it didn’t produce an even number.

The bottom line is that I’ve discovered this great new wealth of information for learning about hardware. The data can be alittle technical and some of it specifically applies to certain hardware, but there are some useful gems buried in the newegg reviews. It definately pays to go back and look them over even months after you’ve made your purchase and have already written your own review. People will even respond to reviews with follow-up information so the potential to learn something you might never have thought of is there. Use it wisely.