So I finally decided to bite the bullet and attempt my first major computer surgery. This surgery consisted of upgrading my HP Pavilion 751n desktop (1.8 P4, 256MB of PC2100) to something a little more significant. Fortune shined upon me and I was able to get a great deal on an ECS P4800PRO-M, Pentium D 805, 1GB of DDR2 667 and a Cooler Master 775 fan. I understand that these aren’t the latest and greatest on the market but for a grand total of $190 it couldn’t be beat, or passed up.
The final piece of this puzzle was convincing myself (and to some extent my wife) that I didn’t need a windows desktop anymore. I figured with the install, MS XP would potentially need a reinstall and I unfortunately(or fortunately) didn’t have the disks to do this. With this in mind I committed completely to my favorite OS, Ubuntu.
I tried to follow the directions that came with the motherboard to install the CPU and fan but they where lousy so I had to create my own instructions as I went. This didn’t prove to be too difficult but I did have some concerns about the thermal grease portion. When I was purchasing the equipment, the salesman said I wouldn’t need it as the fan had some. When I opened the fan, low and behold there was no grease. After closer inspection I realized that the fan did come with thermal grease and it was actually pre-installed.
The CPU went in with no troubles but the fan assembly was a little more difficult. The bracket provided by Cooler Master didn’t line up exactly with the fan piece. I over came this with some good old fashion wiggling and force. With that done it was basically down hill. I installed the RAM and then turned to taking the old system apart.
The breakdown of the old system proved to be more time consuming than difficult. I started with unhooking all the cables. This would allow me to move components as needed. From here I needed to take out the hard drive cage to get to the motherboard. This was simple enough and before long I had my new system put in place.
Now it came to hooking up all the cables I had recently removed and ensuring that the hard drive cage would fit with the new configuration. The cables didn’t prove to be too much trouble until I had to connect the power button. The configuration of the button’s harness was 4-0-3. This is to say that there where 4 open pins, a closed pin followed by 3 more open pins all in a single row. The motherboard on the other hand had a completely different layout it had two rows with the top containing 4 pins and the bottom containing 5 pins. After some reading in the lousy manual followed by some playing I was able to get the power button worked out. Unfortunately I was not able to get the power buttons LED to work. This isn’t really a big deal but a little annoying.
This was followed by attempting to reinstall the hard drive cage. This was the first place that was quickly determined impossible. The ECS board’s 20pin power slot was directly below where the cage was to sit and there was clearly not going to be enough room for both items. So the cage is currently resting on the bottom of the case until I have the time and energy to purchase a new case.
Time for the moment of truth… first power up. This was a little nerve racking at first as I had never done this before and wasn’t sure what to expect. To my amazement it was completely painless. The motherboard made a few beeps and then prompted me to set the time. After this was done Grub(boot manager) came up and asked what I wanted to do. Everything seemed to be in order…
I will let you know what I think after I have had some time to play so come back and see how it turns out 