New Computer Purchase!

[Photo-John]

Trevor, I didn't buy the stuff at Fry's. I only bought the power supply in my original salvage attempt at Fry's. It was returned when I discovered that the board was cooked. Then I visited Central Computer, in San Jose, and bought everything from them. They are very helpful and they've been around for 20 years or something. They do a lot of corporate builds and really know what they're doing. And I did take Peter's advice. I took the board and processor in this morning and had their tech mount it for me. They didn't charge me anything and he let me watch. It looked like actually mounting the processor was easy. It was attaching the fan that was tricky. Anyway, it's done now and I can go home tonight and geek out

[another view]

I'll be interested to see how it goes. I used to be afraid to open the case but when my hard drive crashed a few months ago I was able to replace it and re-install all software without much trouble (thanks again to some help from Lara ). This might be the route I go next time but hopefully I'm set for a little while...

Seems like a lot of towers (at least Dell's) have fairly small power supplies - and then you start looking at other stuff and it starts to make a lot of sense. Good luck!

[Peter_AUS]

John,

Now you know why I suggested taking it there for them to mount it for you. Although it looks easy, if you get it wrong, by that I mean not get pin 1 to seat in pin 1 slot, you can bend something. If you got a chance to see the pin placement, you should have noticed there is a notch alignment for the processor. It was the actual attaching of the fan that is the most difficult to get done without causing a headache, which was my main concern. Point being, these are delicate things and doesn't take much to crack them if not done correctly. I usually use a small socket type screwdriver to sit over the attachment to help lever it into place properly.

Still you have seen it now, and glad you took my advice about it. Would have hated you spending the time to get it all setup and discover it didn't work properly or at all.

Hope it is up and running soon so you can report how it all went.

PS, did you see the posting I made in the moderators forum by any chance ?