Upgrading Inspiron 4600

sealgaire

Hi all,

Looking for a bit of help:

I''ve got my hands on a basic Inspiron 4600.

What I want to do is put a large extra HD in it for running nightly backups on my home network and to also play movies via my tv.

PC doesn't have a dvi port.

I was on http://www2.hardwareversand.de but not sure what is compatible

ED E

Link is to their homepage, not a product.


You'll need IDE drives, and a Graphics card, buuuuut, its AGP, so you need an AGP card.

I wouldnt do it, you'll be putting money into a pile of shíte from 03 and you'll still get shíte at the end.

sealgaire

If I were to get an AGP card for it (do they require a fan)? Is it possible to get a 1TB ide drive? Do they come that large?

I won't be gaming etc

ED E

http://www1.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=25778&agid=1077 500GB here, might go higher if you really dug for one, but price is likely to be a lot more than you'd pay for the same in SATA. If you have the space you could fit a pair to make up a tb.

The GFX Card will come with a fan mounted in factorty if it needs one. If not and it just has fins you need to make sure there is airflow through the case for it to work(just dont rip out the stock dell fans).

There is no hope of gaming, what I'm concerned about is HD playback. I'm guessing you have a 1080P tv, most do by now, so you want something capable of smooth fullscreen playback. Thats not too much work, but when looking at a myrid of old AGPs, one needs to be carefull. Should also note that Aero requires "a DirectX 9 compatible graphics processor with a Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver, Pixel shader 2.0 in hardware, and a minimum of 128 MB of Video RAM", but you'll be no doubt looking at XP anyways.


Say you were to spend 2x€50 for the drives, €50 for the card and maybe €30 for a wireless KB with integrated trackerball you may as well go for something like this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-EeeBox-EB1007-B0560-Factor-1-66GHz/dp/B004YK1CEA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313926877&sr=8-1
With a little looking you could pick one up for below the above €180 and end up with a faster and significantly more quiet box. The drawback it does have is that its 250GB, but it has four USB slots, so adding a nice big 2GB external would be easy, and you have room to expand in future. Overall more expensive, but you'll use a third of the electricity so you'll make it back in a couple of years:)

sealgaire

possible cheap stop gap solution?

Plug in my external HD.
use vga cable to connect to TV? (don't need 1080p res)
seperate audio cable
and cat 5 it straight to router?

ED E

Not having 1080 for movies is a bit dud, but yeah, that'd work fine.

Give it a good dusting too, will allow the fans to run as slow as they can and thus make it quieter.

sealgaire

Ok i've decided that for now I'll just get a vid card with a DVI output so I can watch movies via the TV.

Any recommends? will the playback be clear with something decent?

ED E

VGA/DVI are interchangeable you know. You just get a cable with either end.

sealgaire

ah, ok, i could maybe get a vga to hdmi adaptor and see what the quality is like

sealgaire

I seen a GeForce 8400 GS in Maplin for €55. Is this compatible with my sod of turf?

Actually, how can I tell what is compatible?

sealgaire

OH! I just realised I said I am upgrading an Inspiron4600,,

No, its the PC the Dimension 4600 I have.. Woops

sealgaire

oh, no, thats just PCI-E.
Need AGP card

sealgaire

Ok, maybe somebody can give me a suggestion here:

I think i've decided that the PC i have is just not up to the job.
I am looking at building myself something decent or maybe just get a media drive.

Requirements:
Play movies via hdmi/dvi for 42" telly.
Be able to run backups for laptops nightly via something like Acronis onto it. (Does this rule out a media drive?)
This drive also itself needs to be backed up every so often to an external 1TB drive that I have.


Hmmm,, maybe i could just mod an old xbox and connect it . ..