Dell 5150 Dual Core 2.8GHz inc 19" LCD Monitor & Free Printer £429 (merged)

borgs

Whirly:

Whilst you had your machine open did you see whether it was possible to install a non-SATA HD in there? I've two 80Gb HDs I'd like to install. I realise they'd be slower than SATA but I'm only using them for files I don't access that often.

Do you know how many IDE connectors there are? Is there room for 2 HDs or just one?


Thanks alot.

Whirly

IIRC only 1 IDE connector so you *could* add an IDE HDD....

BUT there would be no way to connect the DVD & IDE HDD if you placed the HDD in the 3.5" housing (the space between connectors on a dual device IDE cable is only short).

You would need to install the IDE drive in one of the 5.25" slots using a HDD cooling enclosure (converts a 3.5" drive to 5.25") or 3.5" - 5.25" conversion brackets (difficult to get hold of nowadays).

In all honest borgs you'd be far better off selling your 2 80gb HDDs on eBay and buying a 250Gb SATA drive.

bookshifter

http://www.play.com/play247.asp?page=title&r=ELEC&title=918158&p=303&g=388&pa=genbrw#

Will the BFG GeForce 7300 GS 256MB PCI Express Graphics Card work with the Dell 5150? Is £70 a fair price for this card?

What PSU is supplied with the Dell? The above card requires A 350 watt PCI Express compliant power supply.

Does XP MCE require any special capabilities of a graphics card?

Thanks

borgs

Whirly wrote:

IIRC only 1 IDE connector so you *could* add an IDE HDD....

BUT there would be no way to connect the DVD & IDE HDD if you placed the HDD in the 3.5" housing (the space between connectors on a dual device IDE cable is only short).

You would need to install the IDE drive in one of the 5.25" slots using a HDD cooling enclosure (converts a 3.5" drive to 5.25") or 3.5" - 5.25" conversion brackets (difficult to get hold of nowadays).

In all honest borgs you'd be far better off selling your 2 80gb HDDs on eBay and buying a 250Gb SATA drive.

Cheers Whirly, I just so happen to have a 5.25" removable caddy (with fan) so I'll probably slot one HD in there.

Thanks for the info!

Kilty_2

You could add a PCI IDE controller to it if it has a spare PCI slot, cost you less than £10 from ebuyer.

Streeet

..or an external caddy with usb.
Then you can take it where ever you want or transplant onto a different system in seconds.

andreboyle

If you're wanting Media Center Edition (MCE) then you'll need software for playing back DVDs. The reason for this, even if you're not wanting DVD playback is that the data stream from 'supported' TV cards is held in MPEG-2 (like DVDs) format and this is why the DVD software is needed for TV playback.

I was bewildered with this on my laptop and desktop PCs whehn I first ran MCE as the PCs didn't come with DVD playback software. A quick purchase 'n' download later and all was well.

No special capabilities needed on your GFX card. My daughter's PC is a 5150 and it's running MCE with a Hauppage tuner that works superbly well. Ii'm writing an app for it at the moment to monitor how much time she spends watching TV and movies. It's there for homework as well after all and it's all too easy to slip from homework to TV/movies/music.

gdh82

andreboyle wrote:

I was bewildered with this on my laptop and desktop PCs whehn I first ran MCE as the PCs didn't come with DVD playback software.

I'm very surprised too - slightly ironic that XP MCE doesn't even have some basic built-in dvd playback facilities :mad: Not even a souped up version of windows media player ?

Does anyone know of any freeware products ? I've used the handy freeware program Media Player Classic (Gabest) on my W98SE pc which is about to be replaced by this Dell 5150 - anyone know if this software would run on XP MCE?

andreboyle

Media Centre Edition (MCE) is just Windows XP Pro with the MCE GUI and the lack of domain connectivity. If you can install and join the domain during setup you're good to go. However there's no way to do this or change the domain membership once you've install MCE.

Actually there is a way that's supposed to work but it's never worked for me and is hit and miss for others. https://www.thegreenbutton.com has further info on it in their forums.

gdh82

Apparently watching DVDs on XP MCE is easy according to...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/using/tv/watchdvds.mspx

No doubt there's numerous assumptions built into this page regarding file types which they don't tell you about - at least they make it look easy!

Thanks for the further information, AdreaBoyle, but could you give me the basics of domain connectivity - I'm afraid that's lost on me