I am upgrading my computer by adding a new 40GB Harddrive, another 128MB of SDRAM and a CD-R/RW Drive. I don’t think I will have trouble installing the memory but the other 2 scare me to death! There is no booklet with the harddrive so I have no clue what to attach it to. I have never had my case opened so I have no idea what it looks like inside. It is a Dell XPS T500 I have had it for 5 years.
I bought a static wrist strap to use because I am so shocking!!! Everything I touch zaps me. I thought if I set the computer on the sink counter, and hook the clip on the faucet, that should ground me. I feel so dumb about this. I use to work at a computer repair shop but I was the Office manager/Secretary/Software Instructor/Customer Service Person and my boss wouldn’t let me touch any parts because of the static issues I had. :roll:
Any help would be appreciated. If my computer dies, I can’t afford to get another one in the near future.
I’d do the the memory first, the hard drive and the CD last. The memory is real easy, just make sure the little clamps at the ends of the chip are able to “click” into place. This will insure you have the chips pushed in all the way. I don’t know if Dell uses proprietary chips or not.
Check out this site. Or do a Google search on “How to change a hard drive”. It has pictures which make life a lot easier. It’s really not too hard. Be careful near the sink. That scares me.
Once you have the new hard drive installed with Windows installed you can change the CD Rom with ease. Windows XP will recognize it and probably do the rest. If you have instructions with the CD ROM then follow those instructions to get the proper drivers.
I would just add to the excellent instructions above that after adding each component, you STOP, see if the computer boots, and then go on.
If you do all the work at once, and it doesn’t work, you won’t know which component caused the problem. If you test it each time you add a component, you’ll have fewer troubleshooting issues.
Great point. If you install the memory first, boot your PC with the old hard drive first. That way you can be confident you’ve done the memory correctly.
Ok, Glad that you said about doing each one and restarting the computer to see if it is working, I was thinking that I would do that but if I hadn’t thought about it, I could have had a bigger mess than I am already in!
Uh oh! I am confused about the harddrive, I was thinking that I would be keeping the old harddrive and just “adding” this second one for more storage. My old one is working fine but it is just so small. I don’t have anyway to back up all of my old stuff except a Zip drive and it would take a pile of them to hold all of the stuff I have on it.
Keep your original hard drive, it’s got your operating system and data on it. Your new drive is likely completely blank and will need formatting.
Once you’ve got the skin off the pooter, you should be able to spot your existing hard drive easily enough. It’ll be sitting in a tray like the one shown in the article that the Flydooderino quoted:
You’ll see two cables going to it. A big flat “ribbon cable” usually gray with a single red strip on one side (you can see it in the picture hanging down from the bottom hard drive), and a small bundle of (usually three, sometimes 4) coloured wires which are the ‘power cable’.
Look at the ribbon cable plugged into your existing drive. It should have a second connector on it (like the one in the photo). That connector will plug into the back of your new hard drive, so that to your eyes, both hard drives will be connected to the same ribbon cable.
Then you’ll find a spare power cable floating around (really, there are usually a few dangling around in there connected to nothing). Connect one of 'em to the power connector on your new drive.
Bob’s yer uncle.
When you boot up, you’ll be booting from your ‘old’ hard drive. Windows (if that’s what you’re running) will likely detect your new drive, but you won’t be able to do diddly with it until it’s formatted. You’ll either be able to do that with a supplied CDrom, or using the windows format command.
Wow, Gary . . . you’re amazing. Even I was able to understand it.
I didn’t want to mess around with the innards of the beast, so we bought an external drive kit. This is a box that your second hard drive fits into. The box sets on your desk, and you simply plug it into the USB port. Pretty simple – even for me.
One tip about the RAM (is it in yet?): double check that it’s in all the way. Then check it again. Then check it one last time to make sure it’s ALL THE WAY in before you boot up. I fried a 512Mb chip a few years back because it wasn’t in all the way. When I tried to boot up, I got some error beeps. I checked the RAM, and it was too hot to touch. The plastic sticker on it was even goo.
So…make VERY sure that your RAM is in all the way.
I haven’t started yet. I will check and re-check if I have it seated right before I do anything. I don’t want to fry anything!
I have a question about performance of the Harddrives or my computer? My old HD is 13GB This new one is 40GB. If I keep my Win98SE on the 13GB and use the new HD as just storage, will the computer run as fast as it would doing it the other way around? I remember my boss talking about partitions or something like that. Will I have to do alot of extra stuff when I am saving documents or will it all just go to it’s own place on it’s own?
Right this minute, my computer system resourses are operating at 28% I really need to get this going. It’s so slow!
I am almost afraid to do this, you guys may never see me here again! :roll:
The thing about grounding is you don’t want a voltage drop between the components and your
skin. If you only attach yourself to the ground point, and the computer has a potential charge,
you could still have a static discharge between you and your components.
The best way is to have yourself and your PC grounded to the same source. You know the chord
that you plug into the wall? Look at the place where this attaches to the back of the PC.
Is there an on/off switch next to where the chord plugs into the PC? If so, turn this switch to
off, and leave the PC plugged into the wall. The switch will keep power from going to the PC,
but will keep the connection to ground. That way you can ground yourself simply by touching
(or attaching your grounding strip to) the metal case of the PC.
In general, as long as you keep contact with the PC’s case, you shouldn’t have too many
problems. It’s not like you’re touching the CPU… Hard drives are pretty resistant to static,
since they are encased in metal, and memory isn’t that expensive if you fry it
If you have two harddrives in your computer, the one with windows on it will be called “Drive C”
and the other one will be “Drive D”. When you save something, look at the save window. There
is a place where you select which directory you put the file in. These directories are all under
Drive C right now. If you want to save on Drive D, you will have to go to that place and select a
directory under Drive D, instead of one under Drive C. It’s not really an extra step, if you are
used to selecting a directory when saving. However, if you always save to My Documents,
then you’ll have to get used to doing the selection.
You guys are great! What would I do with out all of you! I am going to do this. Keep your fingers crossed for me and if your a prayin person, I will take those too!
fearfaoin
I have Adaware on my computer and run it regularly. I also have Norton System works 2005 and Norton Antivirus 2005 and Norton Firewall 2005. I think that is part of my problem with my computer running so slow.
One thing that I have wondered about is when I try to defrag, the system always runs scandisc first and it keeps starting over because something is “writiing to the disc” I go through Control/Alt/Delete and shut down all of the extra things that are running. I have to leave only the Systray, the Wmexe and Explorer up and it will run then. I haven’t figured out what is writing to the disc but I suspect the Norton Protect on the Recycle Bin. But I am not sure.
I like the idea of grounding myself to the box better than the faucet. I will do what you suggest. Thanks for explaining about how the harddrive will work too.
Boy Kathy,
That is quite an undertaking. We all hope it works and we hear from
you again! You are a brave woman to try it yourself. What a great
bunch of guys here to help you so much.
Lolly
Tony, Say that again? ! I haven’t a clue how to go about doing something like that. I know a guy who might be able to figure it out.
Well, I have the Ram installed and it is working and I can see that it is there. That was the simple part.
The hard drive is attached to the computer but it isn’t showing up anywhere. I think that maybe there is a slave switch on the harddrive that I missed or something maybe? I will have to shut down again and check that out.
Now the bigger problem that didn’t rear it’s ugly head until now is the the CD-R/RW drive requires an IDE cable and I have no more slots on my motherboard to plug one into. My other cables are 2 slotted, but one is going to the DVD/CDROM and the Zip drive and the other one is going from the motherboard and shared by the 2 harddrives. There is a smaller IDE cable connected to the floppy drive but it is too small to fit the CD-R/RW drive. The Dell guy suggested getting a PCIE card to stick in the mother board to make another slot but he said that they are probably obsolete and we would just have to hunt in the computer repair shops to see if there is an old one laying around. I am not sure what kind of mother board I have. Would that be the Pentium III processor? or is that something else altogether. I am so dumb about this.
Why don’t they make an IDE cable with 3 ends on it? POOO
OK, your hard drive is 5 years old and nearly full… right?
It may be working fine now, but the odds of it failing are getting better.
Clone (copy) the information from the old drive to the new hard drive and retire the old drive. There are utility programs (Drive Copy, Drive Image, etc.) that allow you to easily do this.
This resolves the problem of connecting another drive.
I am thinking that dumping the 250MB ZipDrive and using the IDE from it for the CR-R/RW Drive might be a good idea. I don’t know that I will ever find a card to fit my motherboard. It would be nice to have both because I back-up my Quickbooks for the farm on the Zip. But, I could just back them upon a CD too. Right? The only thing, I don’t know, can you write over a CD that you have already written on? There are some days that I back up more than once with my QuickBooks. I would hate to have to use a new CD every time I backed up.
I took out the harddrive and found a switch that makes it the slave and reinstalled it but my computer still doesn’t see it. well, maybe it sees it but I don’t. Rolled Eye LOL!
Tony, I will have to find the new HD before I could do that. I just don’t know where it is?!
Now I know why I usually stick to software stuff and not the hands-on tech stuff. This is stressful!
If you have a single drive it’s usually setup as as single and plugged into the end of the ribbon cable.
When connecting two drives on the same ribbon cable the master should be at the end and the slave on the second plug. Change the jumpers on the back of the drives for master and slave. When you reboot the computer the BIOS should catch the change. If not, you’ll have to go into the utility (most BIOS’s are accessed by pressing the delete key on the startup) and force it to reconfigure.
If each drive is on a seperate ribbon (IDE0 and IDE1) they both have to be configured as masters. and anything plugged into the second position (CD or Tape drive) will be a slave, otherwise the disk on IDE1 by itself will be a single.
Are you saying that I need to unhook my old drive and set it to Master? I think you are, but, Man it’s been a long day. :roll:
I unhooked the new one before and set it to Slave but I didn’t realize that the old one would be set to Single and that it would need changed. I will check that it is set to Master. The old drive is plugged in the end of the cable and the new one is plugged in the middle.
I think that I won’t get to do this until tomorrow. The guys are going to be coming in soon for supper and if I feed them computer woes instead of porkchops, They might not be too happy. :roll:
Yes. You can write multiple times to a CD-RW (as opposed to a CD-R). For backup you might want to also consider a flash drive (aka pen drive or thumb drive) that would plug into a USB port. You can get a 256MB one for around $50.
Everything I touch zaps me. I thought if I set the computer on the sink counter, and hook the clip on the faucet, that should ground me. I feel so dumb about this. I use to work at a computer repair shop but I was the Office manager/Secretary/Software Instructor/Customer Service Person and my boss wouldn’t let me touch any parts because of the static issues I had. :roll:
I really need to get this going. It’s so slow!
Tony, Say that again? ! I haven’t a clue how to go about doing something like that. I know a guy who might be able to figure it out.