Low Budget Upgrade of your Desktop Hardware

My PC had bore the brunt of the 26/7 deluge that had happened in Mumbai wayback in 2005. It was still continuing to work fine until last month, when it finally succumed to its injuries :-)

I had an excellent original Intel 865 GBF Desktop Motherboard since 2003. It had 5 PCI slots & also 8 USB Ports. But last month when my PC conked off I had no other option but to replace my Motherboard with a new one. Unfortunately the new family of Intel Processors are Pinless & so I had to look out for a Motherboard with Legacy Processaor support, since I had a P4 Processor which was with Pins.

I then found an Asus Motherboard with Intel 865 Chipset. Although the Motherboard was quite smaller in size & had support for PCI Express Graphics Card as well as DDR2 support, I was still not happy with it since it lacked some of my basic needs - less PCI slots (only 3), less USB Ports (2 - Front, 2 - Back) & only 1 IDE Slot. Among them the one that bothered me most was only 1 IDE slot, because I had 2 IDE Hard Disks, 1 IDE DVD ROM & 1 IDE CD-Writer. 1 IDE slot meant that I could connect only 2 IDE devices & for me the priority would be my 2 IDE Hard Disks.

Inspite of the IDE issue I settled for this Motherboard by selling off my CD-Writer (for Rs.250) in exchange of a SATA DVD-Writer for Rs.1200. I also upgraded my DDR1 RAM of 512 MB with DDR2 RAM of 1 GB which just cost me Rs.400 (800 - 400[old RAM] = Rs.400). I now had a working configuration with 1 GB RAM, 2 IDE HDD's, 1 SATA DVD-Writer. I thus had 1 SATA Port still unused out of the 2. I still didn't sell off my old DVD-ROM thinking that I would somehow upgrade my HDD's from IDE to SATA later on. My PC was now working fine & I started looking out for options to fix my old DVD-ROM so that I could easily perform DVD to DVD (copy on the Fly) copies. Finally I found the stuff that I was looking for - an IDE to SATA (& vice-versa) convertor. Image shown below -
This convertor is available for just Rs.350 & the 40 Pin IDE Port connects to your legacy IDE CD/DVD-ROM drive & the SATA cable needs to be connected to the SATA Port labelled IDE Host with the other end connected to the SATA Port on the Motherboard. One thing which most people forget to do is to plugin the Power Cable to this convertor. Instead of using a separate Power Cable you can use the one used in your Floppy Drives too. Another important thing is that you need to set your legacy IDE CD/DVD-ROM drive in MASTER mode using the jumper. Without these 2 important things your legacy IDE CD/DVD-ROM drive would not get detected by your BIOS.

With the above mentioned investments on new Hardware I now have a very good upgraded System with 1GB RAM & a DVD-Writer, by just shelling out Rs.4500 approx. from my pocket.

Isn't this a low budget upgrade of your Desktop Hardware in times of recession?