Well today I bought a 120 gig Western Digital hard drive. 8mb buffer & 7200 rpm of course. It was $100 dollars with $50 dollar worth of mail in rebates. Well after I get my two checks from them combined with my other coupons it will have only cost me $37 dollars.

Now I just need to see if I can upgrade the CPU on this old computer.

Good for you PW - sounds like you got yourself a real bargain there.

Since you are also trying to update your CPU, I speculate that you are either trying to improve the overall performance of your PC, or that you are making it ready for a more resource demanding piece of software. In the case of the latter, might I enquire whatever it is for business or pleasure?

BTW: If you upgrade only parts of your computer, will there not be created a few bottlenecks along the way? Even if the CPU and Hard drive are new, the motherboard and other central data trafficking components might have problems keeping up the new data rates, decressing overall performance.

Congratulations PW. That's certainly a bargain. $37 for a 120 gig hard drive. Although, I heard that sending in rebates cuts down the warranty from 3 years down to a 1 year. Although you've said you never have problems with Western Digitals, so that shouldn't be a problem for you. :-)

And yes Mikkel, upgrading your PC one part at a time DOES create bottlenecks. And a lot of times even building a brand new system, you can bottleneck by the parts you choose. Although if you make a wise decision on, say, your motherboard or video card you might not need to upgrade them next time you need an upgrade. It would all depend on the pieces you get.

What kind of processor are you looking to get PW?

This computer is for Personal & Academic use.

Right now I have a P2 400 mhz CPU. I'd like to get this up to 500-700 mhz. Basically I'm going to look up the mother board on the net and see what it can take. I need the faster CPU because I've already got a bottle neck from having 512 megs of PC100 ram. My system bus is 100 mhz. The 4mb video chip and sound chip are built into the motherboard. So I can't change those out.

Right now I'm just making some updates so that I can continue to use it for home use without any more problems. If I can update the CPU I'll upgrade from Win 98 SE to Win2k SP-6. And then I'll be done upgradeing this computer.

Ok just an update, I love this hard drive. It's so quiet! I copied the boot sector from my 12.6 gig to this one. But oh the horror I found inside my mid tower. The hard drive tray only has room for one hard drive and it's compleatly enclosed. I'm going to have to cut a section of the drive tray out to let air get in. Man I'm surprised I didn't burn my old one out.

As for the warrenty, it only came with a one year reguardless of the rebates. I'd have to pay $15 for the 3 year. And frankly I'm not going to.

$115 for a Western Digital with 3 years manufacturer's warranty?? I thought Western Digital's had a 3 year warranty from the manufacturer to begin with. Or maybe it's just $15 dollars for an in-store warranty.

Or..... I guess not. That's sure what it says on the Western Digital site. Huh. I'll have to talk to some of the guys at work, since they're the ones who told me WD had 3 years warranty. That's kinda sad, when they're such good drives that they don't give at least 3 years warranty off the bat.

Then again... looking closer through the site at warranty informaiton provides this info: http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

All Retail WD drives have a 1 year warranty, except the Raptors which have 5 years. In OEM (Bare) drives, WD Protégé and Caviar drives come with a 1 year standard warranty. WD Caviar SE drives come with a standard 3 year warranty. Raptors have a five year warranty, and their mobile drives have a 3 year warranty. And it looks like the drives with 2 MB buffer have the 1 year warranty, and the 8 MB buffer drives have the 3 year warranty. So the one you get determines your warranty. Although for an older system such as yours, I imagine you just got the regular Caviar with a 2 MB buffer. Oh well, there goes my confusion over the subject.

No, I got the 8mb buffer. I bothered to read through the ultra fine print, and it only has the one year because I get a $20 check back from WD.

So I just have to re-ghost my old HD onto the new one and I'll be set. Somehow I lost 9 gigs of space in the partitioning when I set if for 100%. And I'll have to change my jumper setting from Master to Single (the only) Hard drive. Then I can format the other and save it for my FTP server.