Very Cheap Upgrade

brandonwh64 · Sep 29, 2009

For some of you guys or gals that have a really older PC that would like to be alot faster but dont wanna spend a bunch of money? Well right now tiger direct has a good barebones system for 149.99 and 1.99 to ship! All you have to do with this PC is take the HD out of your old PC and install in this one and you have a brand new PC for under 155$!

MSI K9N6PGM2-V GeForce 6100 Socket AM2 Barebone - MSI K9N6PGM2-V MOBO, AMD Athlon 64 LE-1640 CPU, 2GB DDR2, Case & 450 Watt PSU

This setup is Great because later on you can upgrade to a quadcore Phenom without having to buy a new motherboard!

If you want to make a good gamer out of this machine you can install a cheap but fast videocard

EVGA GeForce 9500 GT Video Card - 1GB DDR2, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Support, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV, VGA Support

7.5L_STX · Sep 29, 2009

i dont know what any of those fancy sords or numbers mean, but it sure sounds like a cool computer.

brandonwh64 · Sep 29, 2009

its a great deal on a decent computer that is fully upgradable

mjonesjr · Sep 29, 2009

You can NOT just remove one hard drive and plug it into another without reformatting the hard drive without the new PC having the exact same mother board as the old PC. Each motherboard brands have their own bios. Whenever you format a hard drive on a mother board, the bios inbeds a code that only that bios can read.

Again, the hard drive will have to be reformatted once switched. You will need an operating system to do this.

martin · Sep 29, 2009

since when?

brandonwh64 · Sep 29, 2009

i know that jones LOL but he CAN use his existing HD with the new computer with a fresh install of an OS

mjonesjr · Sep 29, 2009

brandonwh64 said:
i know that jones LOL but he CAN use his existing HD with the new computer with a fresh install of an OS

I just wanted anyone to know that it wasn't a plug and play swap, it took a little more work.

fastpakr · Sep 29, 2009

mjonesjr said:
You can NOT just remove one hard drive and plug it into another without reformatting the hard drive without the new PC having the exact same mother board as the old PC. Each motherboard brands have their own bios. Whenever you format a hard drive on a mother board, the bios inbeds a code that only that bios can read.

Again, the hard drive will have to be reformatted once switched. You will need an operating system to do this.

This is absolutely, 100%, not true. You can swap hard drives all day long from one board to another. We've had this discussion before. I do it on a regular basis at my office and at home, at least a few times a month. Occasional Windows issues due to massive hardware changes do happen, but that's very rare. At least 80% of the time, you can boot up and just start loading the correct hardware drivers for the new devices.

mjonesjr · Sep 29, 2009

I have tried many times and to this day never been able to swap drives without reformatting. The only way I can get it to work if they swap to the same brand board they were on.

brandonwh64 · Sep 29, 2009

After Re reading your post i have to say thats false. A motherboard does not put a code on any hard drive that is installed onto the computer BUT There also needs to be somewhere that the BIOS can load the initial boot program that starts the process of loading the operating system. The place where this information is stored is called the master boot record (MBR). It is also sometimes called the master boot sector or even just the boot sector. This CAN me moved to another motherboard. Most of the errors you may receive on loading of windows would be that the drivers are wrong (In this cause because you have changed motherboards)

fastpakr · Sep 29, 2009

mjonesjr said:
I have tried many times and to this day never been able to swap drives without reformatting. The only way I can get it to work if they swap to the same brand board they were on.

Not sure what to tell you about the problems you've run into, other than to say that you seem to be having a string of bad luck. People do it all the time. Nothing about the board is encoded to the drive during a format. Obviously quite a bit about the drivers is configured during the OS installation, but not during a basic format.

97RangerXLT · Sep 29, 2009

gotta say I have had very few problems doing this either. with win 98 it always worked. because of some code in win xp that looks over hardware that it is installed on, sometimes the harddrive will not work if swapped out. most likely you will need to reactivate XP if it detects a greatly different hardware setup than it originally was installed on.

if your install files are not on your hardrive, the computer cannot load the drivers for the new board. this will cause your hardrive not to work because it cannot update or change the basic drivers.

AJ

brandonwh64 · Sep 30, 2009

Yes sometimes it will and sometimes it wont all i was saying in my first post is that is a hellava deal and as long as you have a Hard drive and a OS its a cheap upgrade for people still rocking P4s

Mark_88 · Sep 30, 2009

As a rule of thumb, I usually just format the drive or a spare one and boot the new system from that drive, load the OS and carry on...I consider it a clean start because the hardware drivers from the old system will be lurking on the system and there will probably be registry issues...

And, to be honest, I've only once installed a HDD into a new or different system and the result was so many errors that it took longer than a format would have taken...if the systems are clones and using similar hardware then this will work...with little or no down time...as I've seen it done a few times...

brandonwh64 · Sep 30, 2009

Mark_88 said:
As a rule of thumb, I usually just format the drive or a spare one and boot the new system from that drive, load the OS and carry on...I consider it a clean start because the hardware drivers from the old system will be lurking on the system and there will probably be registry issues...

And, to be honest, I've only once installed a HDD into a new or different system and the result was so many errors that it took longer than a format would have taken...if the systems are clones and using similar hardware then this will work...with little or no down time...as I've seen it done a few times...

all true! after our conversation yesterday i took serveral of my *Tinkering* computer and installed OSes on each and tried to swap them out. and out of 3 systems only 1 worked, the otherones BSOD on boot talking about IRQ and Driver errors

A clean format is always the key

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