I found a neat trick to speed up old machines. Don’t dump them! At least anything above an athlon xp 2400+ (i have done this experiment on this one). For long I have been using this desktop of mine which has the following configuration – proc as mentioned above, a7n8xvm/400 ram, onboard gforce4m, 512+256 ddr1 ram 333mhz, ide hdd pata 120gigs. And then suddenly one fine day after taking lots of virtual abuse my hard disk died. It had served me well, though, taking the beating of torrent writes and simultaneous songs / movie playbacks. And not to mention the unholy windows fragmentation curse.
It was time now I decided to run to the market and buy another hdd. So my quest began and after many phone calls and searching online on estores I realised that the dear old PATA hdds were really a rare entity. The stores which had them priced them above the bigger brother – SATA I and II.
And then lightning struck my ear and few of my brain cells got electrified - why not put the sata drive in my pc. How?? So after searching I found two solutions – put in a pata to sata adapter, and the other a sata/pci card. The latter was interesting since the former would give me no advantage of speed. And we went on and added the card and the sata hdd, did a win7 installation and the speed was amazing.
Why should it not be? Cause imho, the ide bus is the biggest bottleneck in a pc. And with SATA this was removed. So even with an not-so-old configuration, things can run smoothly. Just make sure you have the pci-sata dos drivers at hand when installing win7.
