Evil Mozza's PC Upgrade

Evil Mozza (Colin to some) recently decided to upgrade his 2nd PC. It was an old Athlon 1400 or thereabouts and he decided to ask me to point him in the right direction. Getting an idea of what he wanted to use it for I decided rather than looking around everywhere I'd just go to one of, in my opinion, the most reliable PC suppliers in the UK; CCL Computers.

He just wants the PC for surfing the internet and transcoding AVIs. He didn't need any top-notch graphics ability and was happy just to use his existing optical drive and hard drives. Rather than faffing around selecting different motherboard, processor and ram I decided to recommend their motherboard bundles. So, not needing a top notch system I pointed him in the direction of their mid-range Intel and AMD bundles, along with a suitable case and system cooling. The AMD bundle came in at just under £190 with the Intel bundle just under £200 He's a bit of an AMD fan and opted for the AMD bundle. He got a WinFast motherboard, an AMD Athlon X2 5200+, 2gb of 667mhz DDR2 memory, a decent tower case with a 500 watt power supply and 3 case fans to go in the case; although he ended up only needing 2 since it came with one pre-installed. The motherboard has fairly standard on-board sound and a GeForce 6150 on-board.

It took less than an hour to put the system together and transfer the drives out of the old case into the new one. Unfortunately, XP kept on blue screening when we tried to boot it. This was probably due to the upgraded hardware. Unfortunately a repair install over the top of the old OS kept on hanging in the middle of installing devices so we ended up wiping the C: partition and doing a fresh install of XP. I also set SP3 off installing before I left. All he has to do now is reinstall the software he wants on it. All his old data is safely included on the 2nd hard drive we installed. He can even put a few of his slightly older games on it if he wants.