Please help me upgrade my dinosaur...

[Bekki]

Greeting All, your friendly neighborhood Bartender needs some advice...

I have an old Dell Inspiron 530
With 4Gb of ram and a 1 TB Hard drive
And an NVidia graphics card.

I would like to upgrade the mother board to a 64 Bit system
To add some processing power and alow me to upgrade inthe future...
Funds right now prevent me from buying/ build a whole new system.

Is this a feasible option or would I be better suited to bide my time
Till I can upgrade the whole system?

I'm at w*** right now but can provide more specs for my system
If need be when I get home today.

Any help you can provide would be awesome.

[Lord-Vega]

I'm not positive about the 530, but most Dells have "special" motherboards and cases. If you can find a mb to fit your case, you're golden.

My advice would be to plan a new system, using Newegg's (or your favorite retailer) wishlist for example, and buy the parts as money becomes available. The drawback to this is some parts may go out of stock before you're able to get them. The upside is, if you get a good case, it is almost infinitely upgradeable.

If you do it this way, I'm also recommend you get the mb, proc and memory at the same time. It's easy to swap out other parts as needed, but those 3, I think, are best bought together.

Cheers,
bt

[TrinityTurtle]

All I could picture when I read this thread was a shirt my husband just got that shows a T-rex running around with those grabby claws on sticks in his hands, a big **** eating grin, and the words Unstoppable across the top. That is upgrading a dinosaur! I wish you the best of luck with your project though!

[Bekki]

I'm not positive about the 530, but most Dells have "special" motherboards and cases. If you can find a mb to fit your case, you're golden.

My advice would be to plan a new system, using Newegg's (or your favorite retailer) wishlist for example, and buy the parts as money becomes available. The drawback to this is some parts may go out of stock before you're able to get them. The upside is, if you get a good case, it is almost infinitely upgradeable.

If you do it this way, I'm also recommend you get the mb, proc and memory at the same time. It's easy to swap out other parts as needed, but those 3, I think, are best bought together.

Cheers,
bt

Thanks L-V.

Yeah, that seems to be what I was seeing in my research.
I was hoping there might be a way around it...

Looks like I'll have to see what I can do then.

Cheers.

*Bekki pours you a drink...

[Fedora1]

Ooooh.... I HATE working on laptops.

Too easy to crack those little plastic tabs, lose tiny screws (actually I usually have several left over after putting the thing back together lol), bend a pin on the mb while trying to plug in a ribbon cable, forget to plug the mouse pad back in, etc.

[Arnhelm]

I agree with Lord-Vega. You're best off looking for a new machine, even if self-built, than trying to jerry-rig something in the current system.

Might take a look at Gateways if you want pre-built. I've had good luck with those for years now. Decent components and an acceptable price for my budget.

[cdr]

You could buy a new case, motherboard, CPU, and RAM, and keep the rest of your existing components. Could probably run $400. Then you could upgrade your video card, add a SSD, etc as you have the money for it.

You could look at tomshardware builds for ideas. That's their latest $650 build (less for you, since you can skip the HDD and GPU) and there's even a $350 build there. They tend to pick ugly cases though.

I assume your OS is currently 32 bit Vista or Win7. You can actually use the same key you already have for the 64 bit type of the same OS version installed on a "new" computer, assuming you can find an installation disk.

[Bekki]

Yeah,
Looks like that's what I'm gonna have to do.

My old Dell 530 desktop may be a tad too old...

It's been on life support for a while now, but I think it's dying...

Looks like I can upgrade to a new Dell
With some pretty decent gear for around $500.00

Thanks for the advice all.
I figured if there was any way you all would know so
Thanks again.

*Bekki pours you a drink...