Who needs a ‘stinkin’ case?
If you don’t have it in the front room of your $1M home to impress the visitors.
If you like to fix it and get at it quick to fix, mess with, don’t like cooling issues…
If you want an battery back-up that will carry all the computers of days if necessary, have several laptops for travel, + printer, scanner and all sorts of things you like to have right at hand, want to save $$ so you can have 10K RPM hard drives, have lots of hard drives for cloning on a regular basis because the bad guys and the storms and the funky electric company can’t screw up a hard drive sitting in the fire proof safe and… well you get the idea…
Then do it similar to the way I do…
I build my own laptops. there are several companies that make barebones laptops that let you build your own. Not pratcial unless you are building a hotrod, and I was.
I don’t know if the trick still works, but you can save money on an MS OS by buying the upgrade disk (which “should” require a copy of an older OS), not inputting the product key when prompted, installing the trial on your computer and then upgrading the trial (it’s how I got my current PC up and running, although that was a few years ago).
I didn’t read all the intervening posts, but yes, it’s still possible, and yes, many companies will do the work for you.
Here’s a typical example for you:
Also, if you go over to www.tomshardware.com or forums.amd.com, there’s entire communities of do it yourselfers, with tons of articles and advice.
As a general rule, you are paying an extra $300-500 over the actual cost to Dell or Hp to cover the cost of advertising and service for a pre-assembled machine, when they’re using the exact same parts you can get from a dealer (except for the case, those seem to be custom made.)
The DIY homepage: www.pricewatch.com. 
Some people like newegg.com, but their delivery charges are outrageous outside the continental US.
That’s a good way to minimize cooling problems!
It can be very practical if you build your PC from parts scavenged from roadside finds. 
The hardest thing to find are wireless cards, but so far it’s happened twice. It’s amazing what people discard when they move or upgrade.
I am in a tight spot financially at the moment. I am using a Dell OptiPlex GX110 that I had laying around; I expect the thing is maybe ten years old—I don’t know for certain. I had a guy I know upgrade the thing to Windows XP, but I don’t know the version. I’m still using Office 2000. The thing works but comparing it to today’s systems, it would make a good doorstop. Is there anything I could do to (inexpensively) upgrade a machine like this?
Make sure it’s got the full 512 MB memory. That will do you fine for anything that isn’t graphically intensive. Office use, internet browsing, and the like. Beyond that, you might get yourself a USB 2 card.
Honestly if you just use it to browse and do word processing etc then I really wouldn’t worry too much. It’s running on XP, keep your AV up to date, use Firefox, Chrome or Opera as your browser and you’ll be fine for another couple of years. There’s fuck all wrong with Office 2000, btw.
Seconding this. The only problem I can think of is that a lot of machines of that vintage shipped with 256 or even 128megs of RAM (if it sold with win2000). If you start running modern apps like Firefox or Open Office you’ll find yourself short of RAM. If this happens it might be worth it to spend a little money on moving up to 512 or even 1gig or RAM.
A machine this old probably runs fine but you can do a couple simple things to help it out:
- Do a chkdsk -r and let the machine reboot and check the drive. A 10 year old drive is a delicate thing and its best to find any bad indexes or sectors now rather than later.
- Uninstall any apps or anything you dont need. Run CC cleaner and the disk cleanup tool.
- Perform a defrag on the drive.
- Install some modern AV like MS Security Essentials.
- Make sure Windows Update are enabled and set to automatically install at a certain time.
Lastly, running on a 10 year drive is dangerous. I would consider using some kind of backup strategy for your documents like an external drive or a service like Mozy.
You make me wish I still had the pics of the case I made out of a cardboard box. I cut out slots for the expansion cards and CD drive and such. It was as ghetto as anything I’ve ever seen. Your setup looks nice though.
You need to be careful there though. I ordered some speakers from a seller there and it took me over a year to get them. Do some checking on the sellers before buying, just like on eBay.
I’m not sure I understand your comment re office 2000. Is that a Scotland euphemism for it ain’t no good or do you mean there is nothing wrong with it? Other than that, I do use Firefox and I do appreciate your reply. Thanks for the input.
These are all excellent suggestions and I do appreciate them. The same applies to the suggestions made by Quartz, which you seconded. I do have Windows Update set for Automatic and it checks daily. I am running AVG anti-virus free version, which I’ve seen highly recommended on this MB quite often. I just checked the “System” tab and it tells me I have a Pentium 111 Processor at 864 MHz and 128 mb of RAM. So, the RAM could stand to be updated to 512 mb but I thought that was the maximum possible for this machine. I believe Quartz said I could go as high as a gig but would that require additional memory slots or whatever?
Anyway, at least I have a few things I can do for not a ton of money, I hope. I’ll spend some time checking prices. Thanks for all the info.
On preview, I note that it was you who recommended 1.0 gig of Ram; Quartz recommended a new card.
To echo what a lot of others have said, I build some of my own PCs and do it primarily as a hobby but it definitely saves money relative to buying an “equivalent quality” PC from HP or Dell and also gives me options you cannot get at HP/Dell.
If you’re wanting to get the same stuff I get but don’t want to put it together I think some of the small boutique shops operating on the net or quality Mom & Pop computer stores are a great option. One of the local stores here that I’ve used to assemble systems in the past assemble the system for a little bit of nothing and give very nice warranties. For example on the last system I had built with them, they basically gave me a “four year guaranteed” warranty. I know the couple that owns it and they say most of their hardware they have 3-year manufacturer’s warranty so replacing anything in that window costs them nothing, the 4th year is usually all on them (and some hardware only comes with 1 year warranty.)
In many ways building your own or going with a Mom & Pop gives you a way better warranty than Dell/HP.
For my business we bought a bunch of HP PCs, and I’m happy with the purchase. There’s no beating a company like HP for standard, off the shelf PCs to perform standard office tasks. HP mass manufactures these machines and there’s no easy way to meet their price yourself. Even if I could have put together one machine equivalent to one of the ones I purchased from HP, at a lesser price, I would have had to have done it 8 times over. I also would have been responsible for all the support and repairs. When it comes to my business there is a value to an HP Care Package because we’re way too small to have in house IT people and it is nice having HP on the hook to send out a repair guy to our location and fix the machine within 24 hours time.
I think for most consumers the extended warranties/care packages from Dell/HP are scams and I only see value from them in a business setting. Where you need to pay that premium sometimes for speed, consistency et cetera.
I say they are scams because by and large they are offering at a premium parts replacement whereas parts manufacturers in the PC market usually offer 3-year manufacturer’s warranties. Now, the plans that offer on-site repair are nice, but if you compare the cost of buying into that plan to the cost of paying someone out of pocket if you actually need a repair done it stacks up in favor of just paying out of pocket.
As far as OEM Windows; I do have an answer for that. If you buy an OEM copy of Windows it’s only supposed to be used for one machine, ever. However Windows essentially recognizes your machine based on your motherboard. If you want to port your license to a new build you just have to call Microsoft up and give them a story. I’ve done it 5 different times through the years and basically you call them up and say, “I have an OEM copy of Windows xxx and my motherboard was fried last week so I got a replacement mobo in but now Windows isn’t working, help me.” They quickly work out the licensing and get it working on your “fixed” motherboard.
You have a pentium 3 with 128 megs of RAM. Thats pretty old but still usable. Id consider moving up to 512 or 1 gig of ram. You can find out what ram fits you machine by visiting crucial.com and putting in the model number. Most likely you’ll need PC133 SDRAM. 2 512 modules will run you $100 or so. Two 256 modules will be around 60 or 70. I think with sdram you’ll need a matching pair. If the motherboard can accept two 512 modules it’ll probably be worth it.
The hard drive on that thing will be a real bottleneck. A drive of that vintage will be on its last legs and pretty slow. You can get an 80gig IDE drive for 40 dollars. It will probably have a transfer rate thats 2 or 3 times what your old drive is. You can use a free utility to do a drive copy. If youve never done this before you should ask a techie friend for help.
For about a $150 investment you can have a machine that’ll last you a little while longer. Might have issues playing high def videos or some flash video, but it’ll be nice for basic usage.
Crucial.com says the maximum amount of RAM for my machine is 512mb; they also say they do not have anything in stock that will work. I’ll dig around a little further and see if I can come up with anything. When I first resurrected this thing, I found a web page with the complete specs for it; the RAM sticks were referred to as DIMMS—is that relevant to what I’m trying to do? I mean, if I use that term in a search, am I more likely to find useful information? I do appreciate all your inputs; when I ran the defragmenter, the little status box says the hard drive is “Healthy.” Can I trust that for the moment?
I used Office 2K up until about a month or so ago. I’m not impressed with the move to 2007 – stability, interface, etc., are either downgrades or vastly underwhelming. I’m about to reinstall and mainly use 2K.
[del]That machine can only take a maximum of 512 MB, per Crucial.[/del] It’s also only got USB 1.1 ports, so a USB 2 card is a good idea - it’s only $10 or so anyway.
Thank you. I’ve never had any personal complaints about Office2000. It was installed on another old Dell of mine by a company I worked for in a telecommuting capacity. That particular computer came with Windows2000 installed; it was also upgraded to 512 mb of RAM, along with a second hard drive for backing up the company’s documents. I loved that computer and would love to have it back.