Paul
Thank you for your detailed information.
I have quite a lot of stuff saved on Cds
and portable hard disks IDE format Fat32.
I understand that under the SATA fromat
that will be useless?
Can you comments on that part or suggest
to convert or something like that?
"Paul" <nospam@needed.com> wrote in message
news:i4fuf3$t7$1@speranza.aioe.org...
AAH wrote:
> I want to upgrade my present computer
> as it is quite slow. Running Win Me at the
> moment. There is no problem with my os.
>
> I want setup Win XP first and after that
> move on to Win 7.
>
> I want a new mother board with the capacity
> connection of
> 2 Hard Disk Drive
> 1 Cd Rom Writer Drive
> 1 DVD Player Drive
> 1 Floppy A: Drive
> The money available is £70/£100.
>
> Any advice on a branded motherboard
> would be appreciated?
>
There is a separate group for hardware, so you're likely
to get some complaints
First of all, you're asking about a motherboard, and
we don't know what brand or kind of processor you're using.
That makes a big difference. There are hundreds of motherboards
for each kind of processor.
If you are buying brand new hard drives, CDRW, DVDROM or
the like, all of those are available with SATA connectors
on them. SATA is the latest standard. Motherboards with four
or six of those SATA connectors are common.
http://www.thg.ru/howto/20051125/images/sata.jpg
If you're reusing IDE drives, new motherboards tend
to have only one connector. That supports two drives of
some sort. It is less common to find two connectors and
support for four drives, using the older method.
http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/1283512~1e9a278a8ae8a3120e36b645d718fbd7/80w_40p_cable.png
This is my previous motherboard, and you can still buy these.
It has two ribbon cable connectors, supporting four IDE
devices. (The connector labeled "ATA133".) It also has
two SATA connectors. The processor socket is "LGA775"
for older Intel processors. I used an E4700 processor in
it. An E7500 or E7600 might be a current choice of processor
for it.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0(m).jpg
(This is the processor I was using in it. The motherboard is limited
to FSB1066, so you cannot use just any LGA775 processor.)
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=34441&processor=E4700&spec-codes=SLALT
That motherboard is nice, because it has PCI Express, AGP, and
PCI slots. It has DDR and DDR2 DRAM slots. It has legacy
connectors in the I/O area. It's "old school" so to speak.
I doubt I could still find a motherboard for an AMD processor,
that is as well equipped as that one is.
If you're buying all new hardware, then you have many more
choices, since you would not be trying to reuse the old
hardware.
If you have an ancient processor you're trying to reuse, then
the choices of motherboards for it will be strictly limited.
In some cases, it might be better to just buy a new AMD processor
and connect that to your new motherboard. For example,
this processor is only $33, and it is a dual core.
Pretty amazing.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819104021
HTH,
Paul