In my quest to get the reman we bought working at a ‘decent’ level today I did the second memory upgrade and I installed a second DVD-ROM/burner.
Initially it had two 256 DDR chips in it mean it had a 512 RAM with a 160 Gig drive, which while not completely unusable was pretty rough considering the operating system is XP, which requires oooh almost all that memory to run.
Last year we upgraded one of the RAM chips to a 1 gig so we were running on a gig and a quarter which was nice compared to the crawl that would happen any time we tried to run a game. But now we’re running on 2 gigs ^_^ much, much better.
The next thing to get is an upgraded graphics card. I picked up the DVD burner as well because there was a special going on at the store I was at and the second drive I’d been ogling for a while was only $50. So, given my card also gives me 5% off on supplies like this I was all, “ooh *pounce*”
Overall the upgrade went well. The munchkin had to go down for his nap so I figured I would get things done while he was sleeping instead of waiting until tonight when he was due for bed. So, I popped open the case, grounded, and started to work. There was a general ICK to start out with because I’ve been naughty and not blown the dust out of the computer since we got it a year ago in June, except a bit of perfunctory when I upgraded the last chip before Christmas, so it was pretty grody in there.
Then I made a really dumb mistake. I hooked everything up and went to check and couldn’t understand why the heck the new drive wasn’t recognizing. I switched things backwards so it was master to the others slave, making sure I hadn’t set them both to slave or something silly like that, and no I hadn’t. So with switching things out I put everything back together, even the case as I was sure that must have done the trick. Boot everything back up again and still nothing.
Guess which moron hadn’t connected the new drive to the internal power?
Yep, me! So, I had to unhook everything again and connect the drive to the internal power and voila everything worked.
You know how you always have parts left over? Well, there’s my leftovers. See–I wasn’t kidding about the dust! Anyone for some reason need a 256 DDR RAM chip? I tried to offer it to a friend to help their limping computer but it takes DIMM.