After recently upgrading my processor, RAM and graphics card, I had decided to sell the old hardware to my brother. He has been in desperate need of an upgrade for a while now, his current PC being a “hand-me-down” from me from years ago.

Some time in 2002 I upgraded from a Pentium III 600MHz to a brand new Pentium 4 Northwood 1.8GHz. That chip was an excellent overclocker and has been running at 2.4GHz pretty much from the moment I bought it.

I can’t quite remember when I bought it, probably in 2002, but I moved away from Intel with my next PC, and got an AMD AthlonXP 1700+ with an Abit NF-7Sv2 motherboard. I gave my brother my P4 Northwood based PC, which he’s been using ever since.

The 1700+ was another brilliant overclocking CPU, but it was soon replaced in 2003 by a Mobile AthlonXP 2500+ (Barton) which was even better. I believe the only upgrade at that time was the processor.

Then in mid-2007 I went back to Intel when I built a PC based around the Core 2 Duo E6750. This was quite a major upgrade for me as so many of the old standards had been replaced by newer ones such as SATA instead of PATA and PCI-Express instead of AGP, and the slow death of the molex. Definitely a learning experience.

Since I first built my Intel based PC, I have replaced the CPU with a Q6600, the 2GB RAM (2x1GB) with 4GB (2x2GB) and the 8600GTS with a 9800GTX+. As I said earlier I was going to sell the spare stuff to my brother, so all he needed to buy was a new power supply, motherboard, hard drive and heatsink. I gave him a list of what he needed and he went off and purchased it. I do love Scan and Ebuyer, as they both delivered everything really quickly.

I spent a good amount of time yesterday putting the bits together on the dining room table to make sure they all worked, and once I was happy they did, I set about my old Lian-Li PC60 which had been housing my old AMD 2500+.

I stripped out all the old hardware, and gave it a good clean as it was a bit dusty. Then I started installing my brother’s new components into the case and powered it up when I was done. Everything seems to be working great so far, but there is still more work to do. I have to migrate his old XP over to the new hard drive which can be a messy task as all the hardware has changed and driver issues can raise their ugly heads (blue screens galore!). I will then install Vista 64-bit as a 2nd operating system so he can get the best out of the new hardware.

He also plans to replace the blue LED fans I used to have in the case with red ones, but that’s a job for another day.

The next big job will be to take everything out of my brother’s old case and use it to build a server for my dad using the AthlonXP 2500+. Nothing ever goes to waste around here.