After running smoothly for about 2 years my homegrown Quiet PC desktop died. At first I thought it was a power supply problem, but swapping a new one in showed the same failure: it would shut down after running for less than a minute. Sometimes it wouldn’t start up. I gave serious thought to just buying the cheapest thing Dell sells but found a close match for the motherboard and ordered it. For $150 I got a 2.4GHz Celeron on a Gigabyte mobo that would take my old RAM. The trick, of course, was to get my install of Windows XP Pro to accept the transplant without having to re-install…
Thanks to some excellent guides I found online (try this) was able to do the following:
1. Replace the motherboard
2. Boot up and get into the BIOS setup before it hit the disk
3. Make sure it booted from the CDROM first
4. Restart with the XP CD in the drive
5. Tell XP to install (not recover)
6. XP finds the existing installation and asks if you want to repair (say YES)
7. XP takes a good long while and looks like it’s reinstalling but it preserves all your settings and installed apps
It didn’t even need to reactivate. Afterwards, I loaded up the mobo drivers and then let Windows Update patch the system up to current.
Amazing that it all worked.
Running Hot?
I found a freeware solution to monitoring temps on my new setup: SpeedFan. It seems that the system is steady at 25 C and the CPU at 38 C. Except when I rip to MP3s…then it cranks up. Then it goes up and levels off at 51 C at the CPU (board remains 25 C). The good news is that this is in a room without AC, and the sound-insulating material inside the box. Both the PSU fan and the CPU fan RPMs are being monitored as well, though it looks like only one is really variable (probably the CPU). I hooked up the case fans to see what difference they would make and mostly it just adds noise.
I had previously used the big AlCu heatsink/slow fan from Zalman on my P4 predecessor, but I’m running the stock CPU cooler on this new Celeron and it’s much louder. For now I’m living with it, but I’ll probably look into reducing fan speeds or using quieter fans next.