Building a New PC

Ever since Brian cannibalized and rebuilt his PC, upgrading much of the hardware, he's been nagging me - I mean, suggesting to me - to do the same.

While I enjoyed helping Brian on his pc rebuilds, I was reluctant to lose the perfect setup that I'd achieved with my machine. Rebuilding would mean losing my operating system (OS), and all my great programs, and, most important of all, all my settings that I'd customized over time to be just right for me.

However, my motherboard could only use an AGP graphics card, which are going the way of the dinosaur, and considering how I wanted to upgrade my graphics card (the nVidia 5200 just wasn't cutting it), in the end, Brian prevailed. For Xmas, he bought me a new mobo (motherboard), powersupply, CPU, cooler, and ram, and together on Sunday we spent the entire day (from about 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.) taking apart and rebuilding my PC. The longest part of that was actually installing a new OS (Vista this time - don't give me any guff, it's getting the job done!) and then adding all the stuff back that I wanted.

Before basically destroying my setup, I sat down and made a list of things to do. Since I was going to stop using two of my older hard disks and only use my one large disk (1tb), I partitioned that disk, alotting 100 GB for Vista, 250 for photos, and 250 for documents (including videos). So, I still have 400 gigs unalotted. I copied everything valuable that I wanted to keep onto the new drive. I also made a list of favourite programs that I wanted to remember to re-install. And, to ensure that I kept my Firefox browser just the way I liked it, I downloaded and used this free program called Mozbackup. This let me very easily (nice, simple GUI) save my FF profile. When I started FF on my new machine, I just installed that same program and 'restored' the profile. All my bookmarks, addons and even passwords were successfully transported!

For those who care, my new mobo is a Gigabyte EP43-DS3R, and we went for the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor. We added 4gb of RAM, and an Radeon X1300 graphics card that Brian had left over. I'll probably upgrade that soon, but for now it's doing great.


Here are a few pics:

My pc tower, before taking out the old stuff:


Inside the tower (still old stuff):


The guts of the old setup:


We were too excited to try out the new build that we didn't take pics, but I can say that since the new power supply is modular, it's much, much tidier inside and there is no more nasty nest of wires!