philgr

Below is the current spec of my PC
As im planning to install a full network throughtout the house when i undertake some major house renovations early in the new year, i am planning to upgrade my pc at the same time and hope reuse as much kit as possible as a file server and have a main high spec PC as games machine

Processor XP2000+ Athlon
Memory 1Gig 2 * 512meg Speed unknown
Motherboard Asus A7A266
Graphic Card 64 Meg 64meg G-Force 3
DVD Rom Samsung DVD SD616
CD RW TEAC CD-W516EB
Monitor Iiyama Vision Master Pro450
Sound Card Sound Blaster Live
Hard Drive 16 Gig Fujitsu MPD3173AT
Hard Drive 60 Gig Maxtor 5T060HT
Hard Drive 19 Gig Maxtor 92040U6
Network Adaptor Realtek RTL8139/810x
Printer Epson Stylus Photo 890
ADSL Router Dlink DSL 604+

So whats the current kit of choice, i want to build myself and this hopefully will enable me to upgrade in steps and hopefully at the end leave me with enough kit to build another pc for the file server

thoughts and advice please

Phil G

Pistol_Pete

Phil.
go to http://www.rtsuk.net/forums

You will need to register and then go to the techie forum. The head honcho there really knows his stuff and lives for questions like this.

Pistol_Pete

just my thoughts and this all depends on your budget.

Get a better graphics card - PC World did a great one day deal only on boxing day. A fx5900 graphics card for £93, will make any games fly. They may well repeat this deal on new years day - worth checking.

A bigger hard disk may be in order.

Your Epson 890 printer was great in its time, but there are much better printers out there.

If your feeling flush a new motherboard cpu may be in order.

I quite like http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/home/ for shopping for pc bits.

hope this helps.

dsmith

Dont worry too much about spec for the file server. Any old bits will be sufficent

Mine is dual PIII-600 Compaq "workstation" I bought off a mate @ work. added some extra memory and will do everything I ever need server wise. Remember its on 24x7 so lower efficent power consumption and quiet are the key things. As almost all the access will be over the network ultimate disk performance isnt an issue so go for larger quiet 5400 drives rather than buying more expensive disks which you'll never exploit anyway.

Deano