Hi Everyone,
I guess you must be wondering what I have been up to yesterday and today?, well, I have been working on building a small Windows XP DAW PC using a Compaq Presario desktop PC I scored from the rubbish bins yesterday, I spent the best half of yesterday afternoon getting Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3 installed on it and it seems to be running fine with no signs of flaky behaviour, here are the specs for the Compaq Presario PC:
* Motherboard Asus A8M2N-LA.
* CPU AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2Ghz Single Core.
* Ram X2 512 Mb DDR2 ( I have some other DDR2 sticks that I'm going to try to see if they work).
* HDD X1 160 Gb Sata (there's also a 2Tb Sata drive I installed in it but I don't know if it's still any good).
* Optical Drives X2 DVD R/W.
I've got three PCI Express Graphics cards that I'm going to try in the machine to see if any of them are still working, when I grabbed the machine from the bins there was also a keyboard,mouse, and LCD monitor, they all seem to be working perfectly, there was also a small bag of cables too, so I grabbed the lot.
I managed to find my old Digi001 Audio Interface together with it's PCI card and connecting cable, once I've got a good graphics card installed, I'm going to see if I can get the Digi001 installed and working with the Compaq PC, and then it'll be onto the fun of installing some music software on it, might even see if I can set it up as a small ProTools rig, we shall see.
I'll post a pic of the Compaq Presario PC shortly for you so you can see what it looks like, stay tuned.
And here it is, the LCD Monitor,Keyboard, and Mouse you see in the pic are what I scored with the computer:
I ended up going with my spare ATI Radeon HD 4870 512Mb Graphics card and installed it in the Compaq PC prior to taking the above pic.
Next job is to download and install the Windows XP driver for the installed graphics card before I move onto getting the Digi001 PCI card installed.
By the way, the 2Tb Sata HDD turned out to be no good, so I will be replacing it with a good one later on, with DAW computers, it's a good idea to have one HDD for the operating system and DAW software, and then have a separate HDD for storing recorded audio.