MB starting to show age

I found a processor a 3.0ghz socket 478 P4 (prescott) on newegg and im waiting for it to come in the mail



the ram is as high as it will go by the manufacturer standard 2gb ddr (2X1gb)



MB has to wait until i can save up 250bucks(proc,mb,ram,video)



I will look in to a USB2.0 card in the next few days I found a processor a 3.0ghz socket 478 P4 (prescott) on newegg and im waiting for it to come in the mail

the ram is as high as it will go by the manufacturer standard 2gb ddr (2X1gb)

MB has to wait until i can save up 250bucks(proc,mb,ram,video)

I will look in to a USB2.0 card in the next few days

my video card is a Nvidia 5200fx (pny) the only one that was availible at bestbuy for AGP I will have to upgrade my MB to get better support it said on the box vista compatible and i figured it was time to retire my ATi radeon 8500(true ATI)



I've already started to use sATA hard drives and the dvd-burner and the dvd-rom are on there own power rail



the power supply is a blackwido 450 i guess i can go back to bestbuy and get the blackwido 500 and give the 450 to my sis



and for the ipod i've found out that alot of people are having the same issue its the itunes software its not compatible with vista (fully) my video card is a Nvidia 5200fx (pny) the only one that was availible at bestbuy for AGP I will have to upgrade my MB to get better support it said on the box vista compatible and i figured it was time to retire my ATi radeon 8500(true ATI)

I've already started to use sATA hard drives and the dvd-burner and the dvd-rom are on there own power rail

the power supply is a blackwido 450 i guess i can go back to bestbuy and get the blackwido 500 and give the 450 to my sis

and for the ipod i've found out that alot of people are having the same issue its the itunes software its not compatible with vista (fully)

sorry for the delay in responding as with money being tight my computer died and after 300 dollars and over a year i got a new computer put together and everything is working now

the new parts are:
-foxconn digitalife ELA main board
-Intel celeron duel core
-Kingston value ram 2gb ddr2
-nvidia geforce 9400 gt
-Windows 7

the old parts are
-black widow 450 watt psu made by thermaltake
-pinnical hdtv tuner (still gripping about the processor but working)
-maxtor sata 200gb
-maxtor 160gb pata

the processor i bought (Pentium 4ht 3.0ghz) went to my sister my aunt and sister got the ddr ram as for chaintech MB trashed the sound card is sitting on my shelf of spare parts sorry for the delay in responding as with money being tight my computer died and after 300 dollars and over a year i got a new computer put together and everything is working now the new parts are: -foxconn digitalife ELA main board -Intel celeron duel core -Kingston value ram 2gb ddr2 -nvidia geforce 9400 gt -Windows 7 the old parts are -black widow 450 watt psu made by thermaltake -pinnical hdtv tuner (still gripping about the processor but working) -maxtor sata 200gb -maxtor 160gb pata the processor i bought (Pentium 4ht 3.0ghz) went to my sister my aunt and sister got the ddr ram as for chaintech MB trashed the sound card is sitting on my shelf of spare parts

Are you comfortable or capable of buying from NewEgg online? Because you'll get a better selection of Power Supplies there. I run Cooler Master or Antec True Power power supplies as they're better at delivering power as advertised.

Many of us with more up to date motherboards, hard drives, CPUs and Display Adapters are installing 750Watt or higher power supplies. For the money spent, its well worth it to have the 'overhead' of power available.

BTW, is there some question you still need an answer on? We're all just giving you advise at this point and glad to do it. As advice you aren't nagged by our system here to vote on our answers.

But you sound like a reasonable person with decent user knowledge and are capable of doing your own work. Sometimes we get people here asking questions in this areana you're in that have no experience at all whatsoever. We give them a workable solution and then they vote Thanks for Trying. It really irritats us as we are all rating by our accuracy as you've seen next to our Guru marker. The only vote that raise our accuracy is a FixYa vote so we, me in particular, want to make sure we can communicate so we fully understand your problem, the problems of our customers in this free forum, so our solutions will solve your problem and earn us that four diamond response from you.

So, yes you could go to the 500Watt PS and be better off. I'm not aware of the Black Widow power supply. I stay on top of hardware and the changes and almost all problems today can be traced back to bad or weak power supplies. So, now that I see that you konw what a power rail is, so many people do not, I feel comfortable working with you.

Do you have SATA support from your motherboard or add in card. If its the motherboard I suspect it will be version 1 which has burst speeds of 1.5GB whereas the newer SATAs have 3GB burst speeds. That's only on read burst, like from the swap file, the average sustained transfer rate is only on the high side of 100MB, this is only near double a ATA-4. Its when you can create a board driven Raid 1, that two WD SATA Raptors will deliver killer transfer speeds. Then Seagate release a 1.5TB hard drive for around $150 but version 7.11 of the pcb has had a 30% failure rate in the field. Most of these hard drives sold through retail outlets only have a one year warranty, whereas if you purchase off an OEM retainer like New Egg come with three and even five year warranties. The difference is in the user knowledge level and assumptions that are made. A product sold off the shelf could be installed by a real noob whereas a home builder like yourself has more previous experience and Seagate and the others will give you the benefit of the doubt. Whereas, they know IT Techs like myself who've been a member of MS Tech Net for over ten years get unqualifed support over the phone or email from these hard drive makers.

From what I've read so far, once again, about your responses to us, you have good amatuer knowledge and I'd qualify you right now as a home project builder capable of participating in a Beta program.

The MS Windows 7 Beta is up for release and the download has been made available for longer than usual and the product key is good for 120 days. That's enough for me to learn where everything has been moved and what has been renamed. Windows 7 is a real improvement on Vista and the Beta is very stable. When it is fully release in May (I believe) it will be worth the upgrade to get off the Vista platform. But, I'd use that opportunity to go 64bit too and take advantage of the AMD x64 dual core or the Phenom II quad core. Those processors and the OS in 64bit too, will allow you to install up to 128GBs of RAM if you wanted to. Most of us are installing 8GBs of RAM on XP64bit and this really screams. I have the Windows 7 64bit OS downloaded I just haven't installed it yet bu will this weekend probably. I have two PCs with 64bit CPUs.

One of these PCs I have has an AMD motherboard with the AMD chipset and the Radeon cards run really well on that chipset. The Radeon cards now are fully AMD design so long as its a 4000 series board or higher. These are much less expensive than the Nvidia boards and more stable too for running GPU intensive games.


Are you comfortable or capable of buying from NewEgg online? Because you'll get a better selection of Power Supplies there. I run Cooler Master or Antec True Power power supplies as they're better at delivering power as advertised.

Many of us with more up to date motherboards, hard drives, CPUs and Display Adapters are installing 750Watt or higher power supplies. For the money spent, its well worth it to have the 'overhead' of power available.

BTW, is there some question you still need an answer on? We're all just giving you advise at this point and glad to do it. As advice you aren't nagged by our system here to vote on our answers.

But you sound like a reasonable person with decent user knowledge and are capable of doing your own work. Sometimes we get people here asking questions in this areana you're in that have no experience at all whatsoever. We give them a workable solution and then they vote Thanks for Trying. It really irritats us as we are all rating by our accuracy as you've seen next to our Guru marker. The only vote that raise our accuracy is a FixYa vote so we, me in particular, want to make sure we can communicate so we fully understand your problem, the problems of our customers in this free forum, so our solutions will solve your problem and earn us that four diamond response from you.

So, yes you could go to the 500Watt PS and be better off. I'm not aware of the Black Widow power supply. I stay on top of hardware and the changes and almost all problems today can be traced back to bad or weak power supplies. So, now that I see that you konw what a power rail is, so many people do not, I feel comfortable working with you.

Do you have SATA support from your motherboard or add in card. If its the motherboard I suspect it will be version 1 which has burst speeds of 1.5GB whereas the newer SATAs have 3GB burst speeds. That's only on read burst, like from the swap file, the average sustained transfer rate is only on the high side of 100MB, this is only near double a ATA-4. Its when you can create a board driven Raid 1, that two WD SATA Raptors will deliver killer transfer speeds. Then Seagate release a 1.5TB hard drive for around $150 but version 7.11 of the pcb has had a 30% failure rate in the field. Most of these hard drives sold through retail outlets only have a one year warranty, whereas if you purchase off an OEM retainer like New Egg come with three and even five year warranties. The difference is in the user knowledge level and assumptions that are made. A product sold off the shelf could be installed by a real noob whereas a home builder like yourself has more previous experience and Seagate and the others will give you the benefit of the doubt. Whereas, they know IT Techs like myself who've been a member of MS Tech Net for over ten years get unqualifed support over the phone or email from these hard drive makers.

From what I've read so far, once again, about your responses to us, you have good amatuer knowledge and I'd qualify you right now as a home project builder capable of participating in a Beta program.

The MS Windows 7 Beta is up for release and the download has been made available for longer than usual and the product key is good for 120 days. That's enough for me to learn where everything has been moved and what has been renamed. Windows 7 is a real improvement on Vista and the Beta is very stable. When it is fully release in May (I believe) it will be worth the upgrade to get off the Vista platform. But, I'd use that opportunity to go 64bit too and take advantage of the AMD x64 dual core or the Phenom II quad core. Those processors and the OS in 64bit too, will allow you to install up to 128GBs of RAM if you wanted to. Most of us are installing 8GBs of RAM on XP64bit and this really screams. I have the Windows 7 64bit OS downloaded I just haven't installed it yet bu will this weekend probably. I have two PCs with 64bit CPUs.

One of these PCs I have has an AMD motherboard with the AMD chipset and the Radeon cards run really well on that chipset. The Radeon cards now are fully AMD design so long as its a 4000 series board or higher. These are much less expensive than the Nvidia boards and more stable too for running GPU intensive games.

The advise you 've been give is good so far. But, the current IPod software has some nasty bugs that screws with Vista big time. And, with Vista you do not want more than 2GB of RAM as it is, anymore and it causes problems except for the 64bit version.

You do need a video card that will take over come of the video encoding and decoding. But, I suspect you have an AGP slot and no PCIe slot. That leaves you to a small offerring of AGP cards. Mostly the Nvidia 6200 will do the best job and they're still being made for leagacy systems like yours. You can find them on EBay if you're careful or buy new at New Egg or TigerDirect or just use Google shopping to find one and then research the vendor.

However, what you really are running into is a power supply issue. 450Watts just won't cut it espcially when your new CPU arrives. The 450Wattss on the sticker is not True steady demand wattage capability, its usually very much lower than that.

A good True Power 500 or 550 is what to shoot for that you can carry over to your next build and that power supply will have SATA power connectors on it as you will want to migrate to SATA drives too in the future.

These newer CPUs draw around 65Watts by themselves. When it comes to your Burner, that it a different story. Some DVD burners are good at everything except DL despite what they say and those burners can drwaw some power. If its on the same power rails as a hard drive it will stop a comptuter. It should be connected to its own power cord not sharing connectors with anything else.

So, the more stuff you add, like a sound card, to the PCI bus and expect to add a larger power CPU your PC will be lucky to run on Vista.

Can you go back to WindowsXP?


The advise you 've been give is good so far. But, the current IPod software has some nasty bugs that screws with Vista big time. And, with Vista you do not want more than 2GB of RAM as it is, anymore and it causes problems except for the 64bit version.

You do need a video card that will take over come of the video encoding and decoding. But, I suspect you have an AGP slot and no PCIe slot. That leaves you to a small offerring of AGP cards. Mostly the Nvidia 6200 will do the best job and they're still being made for leagacy systems like yours. You can find them on EBay if you're careful or buy new at New Egg or TigerDirect or just use Google shopping to find one and then research the vendor.

However, what you really are running into is a power supply issue. 450Watts just won't cut it espcially when your new CPU arrives. The 450Wattss on the sticker is not True steady demand wattage capability, its usually very much lower than that.

A good True Power 500 or 550 is what to shoot for that you can carry over to your next build and that power supply will have SATA power connectors on it as you will want to migrate to SATA drives too in the future.

These newer CPUs draw around 65Watts by themselves. When it comes to your Burner, that it a different story. Some DVD burners are good at everything except DL despite what they say and those burners can drwaw some power. If its on the same power rails as a hard drive it will stop a comptuter. It should be connected to its own power cord not sharing connectors with anything else.

So, the more stuff you add, like a sound card, to the PCI bus and expect to add a larger power CPU your PC will be lucky to run on Vista.

Can you go back to WindowsXP?