Older Computer, ram

I acquired an older system that I actually built for a customer back in 03. It has the Asus P4PE motherboard . It has the 2.4 P4 Intel CPU. This is a solid running system and I am trying to decide if I want to buy the DDR ram and get it going again. I also would like a suggestion on how to use my spare SATA 300 gig hard drive in this older system. You think the PCI card would be best as far as making this SATA drive work. Would it load windows xp with a SATA drive connected to a PCI adapter ? I guess I am just looking for someone to tell me to throw this old computer in the trash B) It has a great looking case and an Antec 300 watt P/S with a Plextor CDRW. I was thinking about buying two one gig sticks of ram and making this old thing fly again. The motherboard will take up to 3 gigs of Ram DDR PC2700. What you think Marvin, should I make it run again ? :wacko: Tom

This post has been edited by jerkputter on March 01, 2010 07:20 pm

Why not? If it's cheap enough.

I've been looking at one of these PCI Sata controllers and it looks pretty good.

All you need to install Windows on it it the SIL driver disk. You hit F8 during setup and tell it to read the driver from the floppy otherwise it won't see your hard disk.

That procedure is pretty much standard these days with any on-board RAID controller :)

Oh..wait....sorry! Throw it in the trash :lol:

It is back to life with two gigs of ram. I tested this system with an older 40 gig WD HD I had laying around. I got to say I am impressed. This computer is as fast as my core duo. Now I got to decided which HD to put in it. I want a new one because I do not want to have problems in the future. I may go with the adapter you listed here and use my SATA drive. Tom

It reminds me of a similar system I worked on several months back. It was about the same vintage and dead slow - it took fully 10 minutes to start up after reaching the desktop!

I un-installed their anti-virus solution(s) and it went back to being a 'normal' computer. It was still filled with lots of junk but I quickly understood that if they formatted it, re-installed XP and then used some sound judgment with respect to installing programs they would once again have a nice speedy computer.

Instead, they chucked it out and bought a new one :lol:

I have one client still running a system that I built for them 7 years ago. It's still fast. It's an AMD Athlon XP 3000+. It's been in service for, as near as we can recall, 7 years now. It's a great system. It costs them $50 a year for me to come and look at/clean up etc.