Built in 2003, this PC has an Elitegroup Micro ATX main Board and an Intel Socket 478 Celeron processor. Built on a budget, this PC had only 256Mb of RAM, an 80Gb Hard drive and runs Windows XP. I built this PC personally back in my Gigabytes Computer Store days for my mom.
Nothing of note here, right? Well, not exactly. This PC is exemplifies what happens when hardware is taken care of correctly and assembled with good parts. This PC has ZERO hardware issues and is running all original devices. Even after sitting in storage for the last few years, the PC was even relatively dust-free.
I took the liberty of upgrading the memory to 512Mb and will eventually pop in a separate video card to help eliminate the shared RAM for the on-board video. I scraped some failed compound off the processor and applied new.
The worst of the problems have been software. I squashed a few viruses, uninstalled some printers and old antivirus software then ran Windows Updates.
I will be shipping it back to my mom so she can use an old ZIP drive to get info off of the discs. I will load it up with some remote assistance software in case I need to support it from across the country.
I will test and shore up the combo drive and I may install a flash card reader. I would like to get 1-2 Gb memory installed and a bigger processor then install the Gigastrand OS. It is not the fastest system on the planet but still has much potential.
Of course, being a mid-tower ATX case I could simply replace the motherboard, CPU, and Memory (what I call the core) with something MUCH faster - and I may do just that.
For now, the upgrades I have done will complete the task at hand. I am sure more will come.
MR GB
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