The Professor
10-03-2010, 09:25 PM
I bought my packard bell refurbished in Feb 08 and since then I've been steadily upgrading the parts; up until today I had a new 1TB HDD, ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card and new PSU. I wasn't planning to upgrade the case because it's pretty nice so all that was left was the mobo, RAM and CPU. And bugger me is it a painful process!
I invited my friend round who knows more about building computers than I do so at least I had some help and confirmation before I did things. First we had to take the water cooling system off. Now, the water cooling system just came with the PC and i'd just been working around it when taking the graphics card out and messing around with other stuff so I had no idea how to take it off without getting the liquid everywhere. There was a lot of tipping the case left and right and upside down and letting the liquid run into an old lucazade bottle (mmm tropical flavoured coolant). He managed to get it over himself but not over the nice white carpet we were working on which was a relief to say the least.
I wasn't planning to keep the water cooling because it would have meant buying a different CPU block (because I was upgrading from an Athlon FX 64 to a core i5) and I just didn't have the cash to do that as I'd just spent all my money on these new parts. So he gave me £20 and I let him have it, I know it might be worth more than that but I just wanted it off my hands!
So with that out of the way (and the best part of 90 minutes used up) We stripped the computer of everything but the PSU and used every cardboard box in the room to balance the parts on to stop them staticking (idk what the word is for it :P) on the floor. The new mobo and processor and ram went in no problem, hooked the HDDs up and the optical drive (IDE cable was too short to reach the top but no biggie) and all that was left was the cables that connect the case to the mobo.
By this time we were about 2 and a quarter hours gone and my friend was now time pressured because he had to be back to go out with his parents for food. Unfortunately it wasn't as simple as just sticking the square holes on the round pegs; the mobo had been shipped without a manual and the marking on it wasn't very helpful. We discerned where the card reader and USB ports plugged into but the power button connector wouldn't fit on any of the peg arrangements!
You see, packard bell in their wisdom had filled up an extra hole with some white stuff because the mobo I had wasn't standard (it was some weird proprietary thing) and they obv wanted you stop you shoving a new motherboard in. This made no sense because normally that hole is left open even if there's no wire connecting to it. With about 5 mins until he had to be out of the door we thought "stuff this" and scooped out the white stuff with a screwdriver. Not knowing whether it would even fit we shoved it onto the pin arrangement (the one it seemed to fit on anyway) and ran to my desk to plug it in.
Nothing.
No lights, no whirring, no power. Balls we thought, we took it into the living room for one last ditch attempt. Which is when I saw the motherboard manual hidden under the box it came in... With a rude finger gesture from my friend we finally worked out which pin arrangement this cable went on to (very easily by reading the manual it seems!) and took it back to the desk, plugged it in and hit the power button.
Still nothing.
"Oh big sweaty balls" I said out loud, "Looks like I'm going to have to get a different case that has the right cables coming from it..." and then I saw it. The extension cord... which wasn't switched on -.- I flicked the switch and voila! New PC :D
So in conclusion:
I now have a core i5 machine with 4GB DDR3 RAM as opposed to an AMD Athlon FX 64 with 2GB DDR RAM Water cooling systems are stupid and can suck me Always remember to switch the power on
Fin
I invited my friend round who knows more about building computers than I do so at least I had some help and confirmation before I did things. First we had to take the water cooling system off. Now, the water cooling system just came with the PC and i'd just been working around it when taking the graphics card out and messing around with other stuff so I had no idea how to take it off without getting the liquid everywhere. There was a lot of tipping the case left and right and upside down and letting the liquid run into an old lucazade bottle (mmm tropical flavoured coolant). He managed to get it over himself but not over the nice white carpet we were working on which was a relief to say the least.
I wasn't planning to keep the water cooling because it would have meant buying a different CPU block (because I was upgrading from an Athlon FX 64 to a core i5) and I just didn't have the cash to do that as I'd just spent all my money on these new parts. So he gave me £20 and I let him have it, I know it might be worth more than that but I just wanted it off my hands!
So with that out of the way (and the best part of 90 minutes used up) We stripped the computer of everything but the PSU and used every cardboard box in the room to balance the parts on to stop them staticking (idk what the word is for it :P) on the floor. The new mobo and processor and ram went in no problem, hooked the HDDs up and the optical drive (IDE cable was too short to reach the top but no biggie) and all that was left was the cables that connect the case to the mobo.
By this time we were about 2 and a quarter hours gone and my friend was now time pressured because he had to be back to go out with his parents for food. Unfortunately it wasn't as simple as just sticking the square holes on the round pegs; the mobo had been shipped without a manual and the marking on it wasn't very helpful. We discerned where the card reader and USB ports plugged into but the power button connector wouldn't fit on any of the peg arrangements!
You see, packard bell in their wisdom had filled up an extra hole with some white stuff because the mobo I had wasn't standard (it was some weird proprietary thing) and they obv wanted you stop you shoving a new motherboard in. This made no sense because normally that hole is left open even if there's no wire connecting to it. With about 5 mins until he had to be out of the door we thought "stuff this" and scooped out the white stuff with a screwdriver. Not knowing whether it would even fit we shoved it onto the pin arrangement (the one it seemed to fit on anyway) and ran to my desk to plug it in.
Nothing.
No lights, no whirring, no power. Balls we thought, we took it into the living room for one last ditch attempt. Which is when I saw the motherboard manual hidden under the box it came in... With a rude finger gesture from my friend we finally worked out which pin arrangement this cable went on to (very easily by reading the manual it seems!) and took it back to the desk, plugged it in and hit the power button.
Still nothing.
"Oh big sweaty balls" I said out loud, "Looks like I'm going to have to get a different case that has the right cables coming from it..." and then I saw it. The extension cord... which wasn't switched on -.- I flicked the switch and voila! New PC :D
So in conclusion:
I now have a core i5 machine with 4GB DDR3 RAM as opposed to an AMD Athlon FX 64 with 2GB DDR RAM Water cooling systems are stupid and can suck me Always remember to switch the power on
Fin