Dad's Cheap PC Build

[tardis454]

My Dad needs a cheap PC, his old Dells seen better days, so I offered to toss a $50 PC together for him. I started with an old tower from my friend. The motherboard took a crap in it & my friend had me build him a new PC, so I kept his old one. It's nothing fancy, Pentium 4 3.0ghz, 2g Ram, 80g OS Hard Drive, 250g Slave drive, DVD-RW running XP Home. Everything is good in it except the color, Bleh off white.





I scuffed it with scotch brite & shot some gloss black on the face & rustoleum hammered finish black on the case.





The texture turned out perfect. Dad's a machinist, I'm sure he'll love the toolbox look.





Found a cheap motherboard on ebay for $29.98 shipped...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Asus-P4P800-...-/230717076341



Only other thing I 'might' need is new Ram, a keyboard & mouse. I should still be able to keep it at or around $50.

[SpiderGearsMan]

computers are easier money than GM warranty

[tardis454]

computers are easier money than GM warranty

Only if you get the right parts the first time.

I asked the seller specifically if it had the I/O shield before I bought it. I suppose he thinks just any old I/O shield will do. This guy has some splainin to do...

[tardis454]

Well I got her done. Got a refund on the bad motherboard & bought a much better one, Asus P4C800SE w/875 chipset. Spent all day setting it up & debugging it. It works great, & it's pretty fast even though it's temporarily RAM impaired. Here's a screenshot...

Dad loves GTO's, he had a 67, 400 4spd, Gold/Black vinyl top factory hood tach car. I was looking for one of those for a background but couldn't find one. His 2nd choice was a 65, that was easy to find


So far I have $69.78 wrapped up in this build. I thought I had 4 matched 512 ram sticks, but I only had 3, so I used 2 of the matched 512's, & bought another matched RAM off ebay for $9.79 shipped. It'll be here next week, & then this PC will have a whopping 2gigs of RAM

[Beagle]

new "old" ram seems more expensive than a total hip replacement. I may have some that will work... hit me up with the specs you need. "New" new ram is DIRT cheap. I have an 8 core HP at work, about 300 in memory for 16 gb (GIG - f*ing lot of zero's!!) that I pulled out of the trash. Nobody wanted to drop the 300 for the memory that was stolen from it. I loaned it 4gb from another box. Workhorse.

PM me on the ram stuff , I may have some... unless it's for a Linux box, in which case you don't need it. HAHAHAHAHA. J/k.

[squirrel]

16,000,000,000 bytes of RAM? I wouldn't know what to do with 1,000,000,000 bytes

Aside from the lame modern case, that's kinda like the media computer I put together a couple years ago

http://www.selectric.org/ibmpc/atxpc.html

[boxer3main]

pentium 4..the first classic worth keeping.
I built my own since 1999. the rage of it all.

I finally calmed down with knowledge and went after a buyild better than the surgeon on my bad foot.

the asus, you will be disappointed, the extra bios gadgets- kid stuff..find a true intel.


40529 hours...and silent.
pentium 4, 3.4e (two thread- they can't lie to me)
ECC ram
intel 875pbz (the last winner)

I still do not even look around. it makes me sick. the home user is a low life now.
a workstation does not even emphasize server type integrity anymore.

[tardis454]

Aside from the lame modern case, that's kinda like the media computer I put together a couple years ago
http://www.selectric.org/ibmpc/atxpc.html

That thing rocks!!! Cathode clock hell yea!

[milner351]

Nice work on the finish!

I need one of you guys for about an hour to clean up some glitches in the $280 kit tiger direct PC I put together a year or two ago.

I can't get the bios update to work right, I have to hit F1 to continue through the boot up, and I really need to get the old hard drive out of there and put everything on the new sata drive. I think I'm going to go ahead and upgrade it to WIN7 too.... we have it at work now, and it came on my toshiba laptop.....

[Beagle]

Win7 is a memory pig. Nothing compared to Vista, but it's huuuunnnnggggry. When I find something I can't do with XP I'll start getting rid of the old stuff here.

John, won't keep settings sounds like the cmos battery may be dead. The nickle sized thing on the MB... you might try replacing it, or get the numbers off of it and I'll grab one out of a box at work if it matches (probably close).