Doing Some Maintenance On The First Computer I Ever Used

In 2010 I upgraded my Compaq Presario 6000’s processor to and AMD Athlon 2400+ which is a 2.00GHz chip, the original is an 1800+ (1.53GHz). Well, I downgraded it today back to the original one because the Athlon 2400+ gets extremely hot inside so it ends up heating everything else up in the computer no matter what heatsink I put on it. I caught it up to 80C once on full load which is bad, very bad. An Athlon XP Processor shouldn’t go above 60C on FULL 100% load and this one idled at 55C-59C which is extremely bad. You know old AMD’s don’t have thermal shut-down temperatures, they just keep going until they hit about 350C and by then they’ll be smoking!

I also did this because the coils on the motherboard which are close to the processor’s socket squealed nearly all the time, which I thought didn’t sound too good. So what does the Athlon XP 1800+ run like? Actually it runs pretty good, It runs at 40C idle and 41C-43C full 100% load, so there is hardly a difference which is really good, no motherboard squealing no more!

I put a Seagate Barracuda 60GB hard drive inside it, before it had one of the old Western Digital whiny hard drives, which were slow too, I put a DVD reader in it, one that actually matches the colour of the case, an ATI Radeon 9200SE graphics card which is still a low end card, but a significant upgrade compared to the on-board S3 Prosavage DDR graphics which are only 32MB, and 1GB of DDR 333MHz memory although the computer reads it as 266MHz because it’s that old.

I installed Windows XP Home Edition on it which was what it originally came with, along with some old games such as The Sims, the original one from 2000 that is! Used to love playing that, played it non stop until the Sims 2 was released, then played that until the Sims 3 was released, but I don’t play the Sims 3 all that much any more.

I installed all this old software on it and installed the good hardware back into it to get it running smoothly again, it hasn’t ran all that well since about 2006/2007, I think the power supply has been a bit dodgy since then, it would randomly cut off but stay on if that makes sense! The hard drive would grind to a halt when it did this, although it always worked fine after and it still works fine to this day.

So now I’ve got it running smooth and stable and I’ve installed some old software on it that I used to love using, I’m going to use it just like I did last almost 9 years ago, well, back then we used dial up so not quite, but play the same old games and use the same old software.

We bought it from PC World in Bristol for £700 on the 1st April 2003, I remember going to get it!

Also I have some updated photo’s to upload, and this weeks review is of the Compaq Presario 6000, I’ll probably make some more general videos about it too!

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