MOtherboards - Backwards compatible?

If I were to purchase a new MOtherboard, would I need to replace other components at the same time such as processor, meMOry, psu etc....

Or would I be able to stick my current (old) stuff into a newer MObo and replace the various bits as I pleased?

 

It depends how old your current board is. In many cases the answer is no, you will need a new PSU (for the processor), new memory etc.

You will be able to use your current hard disk though but you will probably need to format it.

 

My experience - over the years - has been that everything becomes obsolete at the instant you buy it. Had good intentions myself of going along the progressive upgrade route, but you'll likely run into a neverending stream of "oh no, that was last year's (last week's?) technology". DDR DDR2 SATA PATA BISH BOSH 238-pin 441-pin 442-pin. If you can hang onto a PC for a couple of years everything is superseded by a non-compatible (not necessarily better) technology - it's as easy (and cheaper) to junk the lot (or find a new use for it) and replace. And two networked PCs are more use than one.

Your mileage may differ...

 

As echoed by others, it depends. I bought PC2700 DDR memory about 3.5 years ago, so when I upgraded to an Althon 64 and a Socket 939 motherboard, I got away with it. However, I did notice that the PSU connector on the motherboard was 24 pins and having bought a beefier PSU at the time, the muppets in the shop didn't bother to tell me I'd need an adaptor. Didn't even realise 24-pini PSUs existed till part way through the build process!

 

You may also find that you expansion cards are obsolete, IE PCIExpress wont support PCI cards, but 64bit PCI slots are backward compatible.

 

All PCIe motherboards also come with standard PCI slots. I would think PCI would be about for a while yet. ISA cards on the other hand have been obsolete for years now.

 

The new boards we have just got for work are PCIe only. HP boards, but probably rebranded.

 

Ah - quite possibly or rebadged Intel. Didn't think of that - perhaps Intel are pulling the pin on bog standard PCI on some of their boards. Certainly on boards from the likes of Asus et. al aimed at the consumer market, standard PCI still exists.

 

Do Intel supply to OEM's?
I'll have a look tomorow, they may be made by HP but i doubt it. All our monitors (LCD) are rebadged NEC.
We do make some things ourselves tho

 

Yep Intel are massive OEM supplier. Dell is a classic example and one which is involved in a law suite by AMD who claim the deal is unfair.

 

Dell claim everything is unfair!

 

Dell and Intel are very happy with the deal, Dell gets virtualy free or very cheap chips, Intel gets the monopoly and AMD gets left out.

 

Thanks for the replies.

It's a p3 450

As I've posted previously, the harddrive died so I replaced it with a sata one with a controller card. However, I've been unable to get any OS (tried XP, Ubuntu, Linspire) to install onto the drive.
I managed to clone it over, but it ran crap.

So I planned on replacing parts as I went along. Guess I'll wait till I can do it in one hit.

Also, while I've got a few of your techy heads together...

My laptop's fecked! It was fine, then I went out, came home tired, dumped my clothes on the chair it was on (covering the vents), and went to sleep.
It seemed ok in the morning, but very hot. Eventually crashed (quite common with it), but when I turned it back on the screen doesn't come on.
Also, it doesn't seem to be doing much. Obviously hard to tell without a screen, but in terms of noise and leds, and if I press the power button, it turns straight off where as it should need to be held down for a few seconds.

It's on a "long term lend", so I'm not sure what to do. There's loads of photo's on there I'd like to get hold of. I don't have any of the discs for it. It was win98.

Any ideas?

 

To answer your first part, Ubuntu should run fine on a PIII 450, I had it running happily on a Celeron 366, maybe your hard disk is ill!

For the laptop, try plugging in an external monitor, that will work out if the screen is kaput. If that doesn't work you could check the memory etc. but there are so many things built into a laptop... Was it switched on when you covered the vents?
You can take the hard disk out, stick it in an external USB or firewire enclosure and copy the photo's off that way though, at least that is something!

If you need a computer as a temporary measure, I've just listed some in the trade ads which will all be having Ubuntu installed.

Andrew

 

Hi Andrew. I've been unable to get any of the OS's I've tried to install. XP gets down to 1 minute remaining, and then nothing despite leaving it for over an hour!
From what I remember with Linspire and Ubuntu, something about no mass storage device being found. T'was a while ago, but I'm sure I ended up finding something about it not being ok with controller cards and that would be addressed in future version.
Maybe this is the same with the version of XP I have?

I've since borrowed an old IDE drive off a mate. It's only 2GB but I've got XP on it, and have the other (SATA through controller) for general use.

Works ok for now, but would still prefer the OS on the larger SATA drive.

With the laptop, yes, it was left on and as I said, it was really hot in the MOrning. But it worked fine until crashing. It had a habbit of crashing quite often (even if MOved with anything less than complete care it would freeze), so I thought nothing of it. When trying to restart it later nothing seemed to happen though.

Can you link to one of these external enclosure things?

Cheers

MO

 

What brand are these rebadged NECs? We use them at work, and they're great, but at a price! A cheaper non-NEC NEC would be very nice indeed

 

I'm sure they are available in shops too, I'm just being lazy:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DELUXE-USB-2-...845214718QQcategoryZ31567QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

I take it you have a fair bit of Ram installed with your celeron? I installed Ubuntu on a P3 866 and to be honest I found it a bit slow to load applications - but I have only 128Mb of Ram and I think AT mentioned it was a bit memory hungry.

Saying that, I quite like the look of Ubuntu and will try it on my PC at home, which is blessed with plenty of memory.

One thing I have discovered is: don't reset your bios with Ubuntu installed, it doesn't like it! Wouldn't load after bios reset and upgrade (I had agp probs) and even after completely formatting the HDD and fresh reinstall of Win ME (I had my HDD dual booting ME/Ubuntu) windows could only see half the drive, and I couldn't do anything with the rest of the drive. Tried partition magic to create/delete/format which looked like it worked but not reliably. Ho hum, have taken it out of PC (had a spare) and will sort it at a later date.

One final note: I have 2 spare copies of ubuntu on original CD's as I got sent 5, if anyone wants a copy I'll pop one in the post for nowt.

 

I had 128Mb in it, it wasn't exactly a speed demon, but openoffice and mozilla aren't quick to load on my 1.4Ghz computer, I timed loading mozilla against an HP laptop (2Ghz+) and it was 2 seconds slower.

Am just installing Ubuntu onto one of the new Toshiba's so will report back with the speed running on that (PIII 667Mhz, 192Mb RAM)

Also, if anyone needs mac or 64 bit copies of ubuntu, I have 5 of each on there way in a week or two which I don't need (I needed 30 standard copies and they come with extras!)

 

Hewlet Packard, I'll see if there are any deals on.