Sister's PC

The elder of my sisters mentioned to me that she was thinking of getting a new hard drive for her PC because she kept on getting warnings about her C: drive getting full. I couldn't remember what motherboard she had nor what size or interface her hard drive was. I advised her to download and run Belarc and bring me the results on a usb stick.

From that information I was able to determine what motherboard she had and what hard drive she had, and then suggest suitable upgrade paths. She currently has an 80gb IDE hard drive which is partitioned into 2; 1 for Windows and Applications and 1 for Games. What I've suggested is that she moves all of her Games over onto a new larger SATA drive and repartition the 80gb as just a single partition and use it as her boot drive. She can get a decent Maxtor 320gb SATA drive for less than £40 and a good Samsung 500gb for less than £45. I suggested paying the wee bit extra and getting the Samsung.

She also mentioned getting a DVD Writer; because she only has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive. She can get a 20x Samsung DVD-RW for less than £15. Although she will be able to fit the new drive in without taking anything out I think it might be an idea to remove one of them; probably the CD-RW.

She'd also mentioned previously that a lot of her games were failing to run thanks to a Direct 3D error. I took the opportunity to download the latest Catalyst drivers for her; she has an ATI Radeon 9600 Atlantis, and put them on the USB stick. I told her to install them when she got home and give me a ring if she had any problems.

She later phoned to say that the installer had come up with an error whilst trying to install the Catalyst Control Center. It appeared that it thought it had a new version of CCC installed. I told her to just carry on and then reboot. When she rebooted the ATI drivers wouldn't initialise so I told her to go into Add/Remove Programs and remove the CCC in there. I then told her to go into the ATI install folder and just install the new CCC. It installed fine and we thought the problem was licked. However, after another reboot the graphics were still underwhelming so I suggested just reinstalling the whole driver set again over the current installation. After yet another reboot everything looked hunky-dory and her 3D games were working.

As an aside, there's quite a number of people with AGP versions of ATI's graphics cards that are reporting errors whilst trying to start 3D games. AMD, who now own ATI, have a link to a hotfix on their website that resolves the issue. It's available from here. From my past experience with the errors I was getting prior to upgrading to my new motherboard and processor I think the problem is with nForce 2 motherboards.