Hp Pavilion xt963 upgrades?

[darsparx]

@ziggy well supposedly the computer came out in '02 now that I look at it and seems to run pretty decently for that age though I'm pretty sure we didn't get it until a year or two after that.

@samson - yeah i wasn't planning on putting win7 on it, I was just going to turn it into the machine that would be running games like civ2, frogger, and etc for all those that wouldn't like my new pc when I build it no matter what I do(since I've already tried civ2 and it doesn't like 64 bit os's, even though the frogger cd is just as old and installed and worked with compatibility settings enabled on it )

@tstr thanks, I'll look there, i just know I want more space than 40gb on the system especially if it's going to be my old pc game machine for what I have and probably will find at goodwill and other places(especially if i ever get around to replacing my Roller coaster tycoon 1 and school tycoon too)

edit: hrmm, looks like the laptop I'd gotten from my grandmother a few weeks ago(if i could find a way to add a vga port and make it somewhat act like a desktop when at home). The thing is a portege 4005. Which supposedly can be upgraded to 1gb of sdram, and the thing has a 30gb hdd supposedly and is xp pro

[samsonlonghair]

Thanks for elaborating upon the history of IDE, Hobie. Interesting stuff.

Now let's look at your Operating system, Darsparx. It seems that HP may have left a hidden partition on your hard drive to re-install winXP to factory default settings. See this page for more info.

If you're feeling tricky, you may look into a few "lite" versions of winXP. These pirate distros strip out unnecessary software components like the luna theme, windows messenger, and laptop power management. The result is a faster (but less stable) windows OS. I used a few of these back in my youthful piracy days. Of course, Microsoft does not approve of such things. Use at your own risk.

By the way, I looked up the specs for your granny's portege 4005. Looks like one step forward (in terms of max RAM) and two steps back (in terms of CPU and audio) to me. Also, it's significantly easier to perform repairs and upgrades on a desktop than on a laptop.

[Ziggy]

poiler tags prevent the url from stretching out the page.

If you post a long link with out URL tags, the forum will automatically shorten it for you and still make it a hyperlink.

Let me try: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/docu ... n4FmiDHSRw

edit: Yep, worked.

The URL tags are really only useful if you wanna do something like "See this page for more info," otherwise they're kinda pointless to use. That is, unless for some reason you DON'T want to shorten the link address.

[samsonlonghair]

Alright Ziggy, I edited my post per your guidelines. Now why don't you use your technical thinking skills to help darsparx fix his computer rather than fixing my posts?

[darsparx]

Well I think I'm going to try and go for some of the parts tstr has and try to upgrade the ram. I think with what upgrades can be done the thing will make a fine "retro pc" for what stuff can be played on it(and in fact I'm also looking at getting a better desk than what I have now to house both this and that newer pc that i want to build and even house the hd consoles too but that's something else to worry about later)

[darsparx]

I'm just wondering when I do get the new hard drive from tstr what is the best way to go about moving stuff over? I mean the thing works fine now to do just about anything so I'm almost half tempted to leave the 40gb in there as spare space since the thing I think has two bays for drives like that...I'd just want to switch the bigger one to the top one though...

[Fragems]

I have some old ram, CPUs, DVD/CD Drives, and etc. from older systems that I gutted for spare cases. Don't think any of the ram or CPUs will fit your system but you are free to any of it you want it's just taking up space in my closet currently .

[darsparx]

If only the cpu's were socket 270's and the ram anywhere near compatible with pc133 I would, since that would be great...celerons are nice but those pentiums(even the ones that would fit this computer) seem a lot nicer than the stock cpu....

[darsparx]

Ok since i've now determined that i'll have to look into a different video card(have gotten everything else hooked up(just haven't gotten a new cpu, and video card will NOT work given the connections :-\ ), how should i go about hooking up the new hdd? I know about the power cord, but should I move the original hdd up to the first bay or what? The computer has a weird master/slave cord that with the way that cord works i might have to move it unless moving the cord won't fudge it up. I really don't want to screw this thing up in the process of trying to get it to work properly...

[isiolia]

You can probably arrange the drives as you like, as long as you swap the jumpers to actual master/slave positions. Cable select is usually the default because most of the time it's more convenient.