My sister in law is still running an old KLE-133 motherboard with a Duron 1.3 CPU and 256 mb of PC-100 sdram using the onboard video. Even though she has broadband internet, it is so slow loading web pages, you would think she was still on dial up. Oh and she is running XP, probably a pirated copy since she doesn't have an install disk.
My plan is to give her my son's old PC. It is also old and slow, but not nearly as old and slow as her current system. It has a MSI KT-3 Ultra mainboard, with an Athlon XP-1700 chip clocked to 1.8 Ghz, with 1 gig of PC-2700 ram and an XFX 6800 XT AGP video card. I plan to reformat its hard drive and maybe do a clean install of XP for her. My question is, could I try to install her existing hard drive as the master drive, thereby retaining all her short cuts, files and programs? Both mainboards are Via chipsets, and I could install the chipset drivers once I make the swap. Or is this a bad plan? I have been out of the system building game for a while since systems got so cheap and operating systems got kind of expensive. But I hate to waste what was once decent hardware, and compared to what she is running now, it would be a decent upgrade. She could certainly afford a new system, but her husband says it would be a waste since she doesn't use it that much. (I think she would use it more if it wasn't so dog slow).
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks.
My plan is to give her my son's old PC. It is also old and slow, but not nearly as old and slow as her current system. It has a MSI KT-3 Ultra mainboard, with an Athlon XP-1700 chip clocked to 1.8 Ghz, with 1 gig of PC-2700 ram and an XFX 6800 XT AGP video card. I plan to reformat its hard drive and maybe do a clean install of XP for her. My question is, could I try to install her existing hard drive as the master drive, thereby retaining all her short cuts, files and programs? Both mainboards are Via chipsets, and I could install the chipset drivers once I make the swap. Or is this a bad plan? I have been out of the system building game for a while since systems got so cheap and operating systems got kind of expensive. But I hate to waste what was once decent hardware, and compared to what she is running now, it would be a decent upgrade. She could certainly afford a new system, but her husband says it would be a waste since she doesn't use it that much. (I think she would use it more if it wasn't so dog slow).
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks.