need help upgrading

[DESTINO09]

I want to upgrade the current cpu and mobo I have but I am a new jack, so I would like to try it first on something a little les valuable to me. See we have old cpu in the closet and I would like to work on it first. I believe its a dell mobo with a pentium 75mghz. Now my question is what is the fastest and cheapest way to upgrade this baby b/c if it does work I'll set it up for my nephew. Also it says that it is a socket Five.

[barry glisson]

i dont know about upgrading a dell but if i can build a system and with the help of the outstanding advice available here at sysopt get it to work you can too. barry

[This message has been edited by barry glisson (edited 03-27-2000).]

[qball]

Barry's right. All the info one needs is at your finger tips.

You should understand a few things before venturing into the knuckle scraping opportunities residing inside that beige box.

First, it is not always cheaper (used to be, not any more) to build your own box.

There are a plethora of Mobos, procs, memory, graphics, and peripherals. They often can create compatibility problems. You have Pentium (I,II,II), Celeron, Athlons, Cyrix, K2, K3 procs that fit into Socket7, Slot1, SlotA, Slocket mobos. I won't even get into memory and hard drives. There is a lot of stuff out there and new stuff is constantly arriving. Keep at it and you'll learn all the existing stuff, then just spend a few hours each week keeping up.

Lastly, be safe and unplug everything and make sure your grounded properly. I've seen static take out many a SIMMs.

I diverge, but wish you well on your journey young Jedi. So let's begin. Find the Mobo manual for the old Dell box you have. You will find jumper settings for different speed CPUs supported. Jumpers are a pain in the ***, but you gots to deal with them on older mobos, and don't lose them!. Find the fastest clock speed 1500Mhz - 200Mhz. Whatever it states is the fastest clock speed the board will allow. Putting in a faster chip will run at this top speed. You may want to overclock the 75Mhz, but that is another lesson. Go to www.pricewatch.com (http://www.pricewatch.com) and buy a CPU for socket7 (PentiumI or AMD K? procs) These should be very cheap, no more than $20-$30. You may want to venture to a computer fair, but the admission could be as much as the proc.

There will be instructions either in the Mobo manual or with the new chip on how to replace. Basically most socket7 are ZIF (zero insertion force) and have a little handle below the proc on the socket. Move this lever up and the proc is released and you merely pick it right up. Place new proc in socket and move arm down to original postion. Set the jumpers for clock speed per manual. Don't put cover back on just yet. Reconnect everything and boot. The BIOS will show the clock speed on boot and hopefully it match your jumpers. Iffin nothing happens, you have to do a little troubleshooting.

Good luck, have fun and welcome to the world of SCSI, ISA, PCI, SIMM, DIMM, RAMBUS, AGP, somebody stop me...