Some hardware Qs

[Jojimbo]

Hey,

I just took apart my old custom built PC, as the motherboard went ages ago and we've just been sitting on it (well, its been a table for my school books ). I've already taken out the 127Gig (should been 200 /sigh) HDD and put it into a enclosure or w/e, basicly turned it into an external USB HDD.

So anyway, I took more or less everything out and I'm left with:

2x Kingston 512 MB RAM cards
Pioneer DVD-107DB
Samsung SD 616 (Another DVD drive)
+ One of the neon light thingys that survived XD


My new PC which we have had for a few months is a HP Pavilion using Intel V//V and running on Vista Home Premium. Radeon X1650 SE Graphic card (512 MB), Intel Core 2 CPU 6420 @ 2.13GHz processor. Currently it has 2046 MB RAM in it.

Basicly the Q im asking is, would it be safe to put the RAM, one of the DVD drives and HDD inside? It looks like theres room (apart from few missing cables), my mum is anti it as she was saying it will void the warrenty, which is why I'm asking.

I have looked inside the PC, and there is what looks like there is room for another HDD, and an area for another DVD drive (labled "Expansion bay" on outside of case), the problem being is that there are these red cables which go from DVD/HDD to motherboard, where they go into 1 of the 4 slots (all differnt colours, two are used by current DVD/HDD) so it looks like there is room there but I can't see any spare cables within the PC, so would it be possible to buy them or would it be better just to scrap DVD drives and keep HDD external? (On a side note, which DVD drive it better? Pioneer looks better to me but just wanted to ask).

For the RAM, there are two brown slots and two blue, the blue ones have my 2 1024 MB cards in atm. The PC I just got the old cards out of had brown slots as well, so am I right in assuming that It's a simple case of inserting them (and maybe DLing some drivers) and then I'll have another Gig of RAM (They will most likely get thrown out if I don't use them, so why not).


Sorry for long post ^^; It I missed out any details just say and I will post them

[Kaisha]

What's the clock speed on the old ram vs. new?

iirc your PC will throttle down the faster ram to keep it in line with the slower crap. If there is indeed a warrenty on the PC, I'd just wait on that to passover first before mucking with it.
(besides, 2gb is more than enough for most things these days anyway, [EDIT] I believe adding more ram would turn-off dual-channeling as well no?)


Aside from the warrenty issue again, DVD drive shouldn't be an issue long as your ribbon cable's got a free slot on it, as well as your PSU being able to handle the extra hardware.

[Jojimbo]

Hmmm Clock speed, my old PC was 2.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 (wasn't dual core) iirc.

I know that 2Gig RAM is quite enough XD But it's not like they will have any other use (unless it is possible to sell them, on eBay or something like it).

Didn't know that adding more RAM will slow down PC lol x.x And the ribbon things you were talking about, the ones in this PC arn't like my old one (one PC had those wide, thin ribbon looking things going from motherboard to components). My new PC has what looks like slightly flattened wires (about 1cm wide I'll say, by ~4mm), guess they are the same thing, but I can't see any more (they are seperated, and just connect motherboard to component) in the case

[Avanarius]

It wouldn't really slow the computer down, it COULD just have potential major stability issues depending on the memory timings.

[Vyvian]

But isn't a P4 Prescott board using DDR333 or 400, a new C2D board would be using DDR2-667 or 800, are the 2 even compatible?

I personally wouldn't touch the ram. too much age difference it sounds like.

For the drives you need to check if the 40 pin IDE connection is on the motherboard, if its not then you can't use IDE drives.

[levish]

if the Pavillion is only a few months old it's fairly certain that it's DDR2 not to mention DDR(1) won't even fit in the slots.

Memory has it's own speed / timing designations and I personally would not mix and match them, can cause hard to track down problems / instability.

Choose either the ram you have or the stuff that's in there already but imo don't mix and match unless you feel comfortable testing them with a program like memtest86+ 1.70 booted from a CD and left to run for about 24-48hrs.

the DVD drives should be fine and yes you can just find the appropriate cables for them, at worst you may need to fiddle with the jumper settings on them if they are not SATA DVD drives.

[Osede]

HDD and dvd driver can fit in without any problem. While RAM will has some issue. Even thought nowadays same type of ram (i.e 667 mhz) with same manufacture but different manufacture number, there also might has a compatibility issue with the same mobo. Usually you can check the compaitibility from the mobo website or the dealer website you bought from