shanenin

Their is no reason to buy a PSU from Dell. They all use the same standard ATX supply. I would not recommend buying one from bestbuy. They will charge her a small fortune for a low quality unit. For the price, this one is great. She could pay as low as $15 plus shipping for something cheaper. I have used quite a few of these. They are not the best quality, but for the price they are decent. For what its worth, bestbuy would sell the same quality(as the $15 dollar one) or worse for $70

You should not have a problem doing it. You just need to make sure the Pentium you choose is compatible. If you can give us the specs of the motherboard or computer model, we should be able to help guide you.

I started my computer service(repair) business about 2 years ago with a 1/6 page ad in "Yellow Book". This ad cost me $140/month. The first year I did it part time. The second year I expanded to two 1/2 page ads in both "Yellow Book" and "Dex" yellow pages. These two ads cost me about $1100/month. The ads paid for themselves with a little extra as profit. Towards the end of my second year(last august) in business I leased a location for in a business district. This was a big move. Prior to this, I ran the business from my home. I still hardly feel like a professional, but by definition I am.

I am pretty certain Windows XP Disk Management will not let you create a partition larger then 32gbs. If it was me I would use Fdisk from a live linux cd, or use an MS boot disk which also contains fdisk, this may be easier. this link below will allow you to create a boot disc in the form of a bootable cd. I would recommend this one: winme_bootdisk.iso http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html

I have considered doing something like that. I am kind if curious to how you do things. i may email you. Thanks. Congrats on your certification :-) By the way, what did it take to become a

At work where I use my Vista laptop, I always just pull out my usb flash drive as soon as the light quits flashing, without clicking on the remove device icon. I have not had any problems with lost data. I assumed Vista disables write caching by default as XP does. I just noticed on my Vista computer does not do this. My flash drive had write caching enabled. Is this the normal default behavior? If it is, why would they do that for portable drives?

you could but most people don't want to pay the extra cost to upgrade to XP :-) It is about $100 for the license. With that said I have had three cleints that paid me to install XP on their Vista computers.

I found this. The one thing you will be losing if you run your drives in IDE emulation is a feature of SATA called Native Command Queuing. Under some circumstances this can increase performance, but in others like gaming and sequential reads & writes, it can actually slow things down. It is something to think about.

Every motherboard I have come across will allow you to either run your SATA drives in "SATA mode" or "IDE mode". This is set through the bios. Unless you need to use raid, their is no good reason to use "SATA mode". I don't think their is much if any performance difference. The huge benefit to using "IDE mode" is XP will load natively without having to load SATA drivers during the install. The bios must emulate the SATA drives as IDE(just guessing)

No I have not been able to work on any linux boxes, I have done a few OSX upgrades. As of today, I do not even own a linux system. I was short on money and computers, so I brought my linux workstation from my home to my office. I use Acronis, a windows program, to backup up client computers, so I had to install XP on it(my linux system). I really miss linux, someday I will run it again. As to business, it has been great. I am paying my monthly bills of about $2500, and have been averaging about $1500/month left over as profit. This is the busy season for computers. Come April through August my

I agree. You can have the best processor in the world, but without enough memory your computer just sucks. I cringe when I see people running XP with 128MBs. As to Vista, I ran my laptop with 1Gb actually 896Mbs(128Mbs is decidated to the video card), for about 6 months. It seemed a little slow, but not bad. I just recently upgraded it to 2 gbs. I am not sure if I see a big difference.

I just got a everex laptop in my shop with Vista loaded on it. The crazy thing is the OS only has 384MBs of memory for the system to use. I assume it has a 512MB stick with 128MBs dedicated to the video card. My client asked me if their is anything that could be done to speed it up. This is a no brainer.

The $599 Mac Mini is so tempting. I can't rationalize spending the money, but I really want it bad. I am so sick of using Windows everyday at work. Coming home from work then using OSX would be a nice change(so would linux). I like the fact I can use bash with the command line, that is cool. I kind of think the 5200 rpm harddrive may slow it down a bit. Other then heat, I don't know why Apple would go with the slow drive.

I am going to move this to PC Support. It is a more appropriate place for this question.

I am impressed by your business skills :-)

It definitely could be the mother board, with a high probability. Try resetting the cmos, usually pulling the battery is sufficient, you may also have jumpers to move. If you have two sticks of ram, try individual sticks in each socket. It may not be a bad idea to remove your sata and ide devices, assuming they are causing a problem. It should still post without them.

Is that an AM2, I ask because they only use 65 watts. Even if it is socket 939(higher wattage), you could probably get by with 300 watts. Pull out the video card and use oboard, and a 250 watt PSU should be fine. edit added// Those numbers may be low, I did not do much detailed figuring. I see Dell Pentium 4 systems with onboard video that are sold with 250 watt PSU all the time.

a bad power supply or motherboard could cause that symptom. I would try a new PSU ans see if that helps. I have personally came across computers where the power supply seemed to be working(lights on and fans running), but would not properly boot the computer

If you uninstall epower, it should revert back to using XP power Managment.

I am really a computer newbie. I bought and used my first computer in December of 2002. It was a 2.0 celeron system with 256mbs of Ram running Windows XP. About 3 or 4 months later I installed linux(redhat 8) on it(dual boot). Today I fix computers for a living.

I have seen quite a few boards that don't send a signal to the monitor, and almost always the whole mother board is bad(not just the video). When this happens, do you notice if it makes a post beep?

Thats great!! I am glad my post helped somebody. Thanks for the response.

I personally have had Microsoft updates mess up my video drivers on several occasions. I don't let Microsoft updates do drivers ever, if they are already working.

you can also type that directly into the "run" box.

this is kind of neat