Besides putting up with it for quite some time now as a test-bed, I feel at a loss trying to fill its history even though it doesn't really have much. It doesn't have a name right now, and I usually refer to it as "the Dell".
A couple days ago, my best friend received some old video cards (nVidia 9960 GT and Radeon X1950 GT) and at first I kinda poked at it a bit before letting him put it away. After a couple hours I realised I could use the X1950 GT for the Dell, seeing the video card that was in the Dell was really basic (Radeon X300 SE; I'll elaborate on this a bit more later) and needed some sort of upgrade. He asked about the old X1650 I had, and reminded him that it went into my parents' computer (Intel build). After taking it home (at about midnight), it was hard for me to sleep because I wanted to tinker so badly, but eventually I got 4 hours of sleep and had to get moving.
I took the Dell's original video card out and plugged in the X1950 and calculated the wattage before continuing, to make sure the PSU wasn't going to be underpowered. I had to choose a slightly random processor since I couldn't remember what was in there, but it worked just fine anyway.
To my surprise, the long delay between when I pressed the power button to when it actually booted was a lot shorter than I was accustomed to. With the X300, I had to wait at least a couple minutes (I thought the PSU was on its way out and had to charge the capacitors or something) and this became commonplace, so I just dealt with it.
But after that, everything seemed to be faster... Maybe it was just an illusion, but at the least the Dell became that much more reliable.
While I was trying to get to sleep after getting the card from my friend, I poked around on the net to see if the socket 775 processor that my friend had was going to be compatible, and after testing out the X1950, I double-checked my results, as browsing the net on a phone can get kinda awkward and/or frustrating. I'm not able to as the processor that he has is a Core 2 Duo and the Dell can't handle anything more than a Pentium D.
This kinda leads back to when I was going to upgrade the Dell to give to my parents. Back then, I only found that it wasn't compatible as the BIOS was locked to certain processors. When I did my research yesterday (which feels hard for me to believe), I learned that it was because one of the pins for the socket doesn't output enough power for the socket 775 series Core 2 processors.
Eventually, I decided that I wanted to upgrade the Dell a bit to serve as a better test-bed and maybe find a use for it. I researched what the possible processor upgrades are, and I found the Pentium D 960 to be the highest, but with the power supply calculator's results, I'm better off sticking with the Pentium D 945, which I found surprisingly cheap on Amazon (after skimming the reviews, it's a refurbished processor).
The only thing was that I'd have to upgrade the BIOS for it to allow the processor to work, and luckily, I found the highest revision on Dell's support site. The only problem was that windows wasn't installed, there wasn't a floppy drive, and that I didn't have a working external floppy drive to use. After a tad bit of searching, I found Rufus which was a USB-bootable DOS that I can use to run the BIOS update program (.exe). While the update process was in progress I was a bit edgy the entire time as sometimes BIOS updates fail and/or kill the chip, but everything turned out fine.
But now as I think about it, I'm not entirely sure if it's necessary to upgrade the processor. I'm sure as I use the Dell for more testing I'll find the answer.
While I was making sure the new video card was okay to use, I looked up the part number to the X300, as I couldn't remember what it was when I did it a long while back, and the results looked familiar. When I originally got the Dell, the video card seemed to be fine, but over time, I had the problem of it causing a long boot time. If that wasn't bad enough, at some point while I was testing, the screen locked up and the on-board speaker started screeching. I don't remember how I narrowed it down to the X300, but eventually I put an exhaust slot fan above the X300 (Dell's motherboards are backwards, so the heat-sink is on top of the video card instead of the bottom) to pull the air off of the dinky little heat-sink and immediately blowing it out. While the intake to the slot fan only covered half the heat-sink, it seemed to have worked well enough.
I may upgrade the ram from 2gb to four, but again, I'm unsure if I really need to.
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