Newbie Advice Sought

[mrogovin]

I have a Dell2400 Desktop that I want to replace for as little as possible. Is it feasible to keep the case, fan and power supply and replace the motherboard & processor? The HDD & DVD are IDE so would presumably be replaced (necessary?) and I would need RAM of course (It has 1GB). What else (if anything) is it practical to salvage? The machine would run either Win7 or Linux

 

[USAFRet]

Either keep it as is and run a lite Linux distro, or replace everything.
Or both and have 2 systems.

There is really nothing salvageable on that to use in a new build.
PSU is too underpowered.
Motherboard/RAM/GPU all incompatible with anything newish.
IDE drives need to go.

 

[superfreestyleer]

I just looked at the specs of these sort of things and I think your biggest issue with keeping the case is the way that they have a fan shroud set up to suction over the cpu. If you use a different motherboard, with a different socket, it will be likely that it won't quite line up right or it won't fit. If you were to remove the fan shroud, even then, I'm not sure if you could fit a heatsink in their comfortably. You could definitely extract fans and powersupply though. There is very little in such an old machine that will likely be worth salvaging other than that though. An issue you might run into with the power supply, though, is that it is likely old and will only have a 20pin connector instead of the more modern 24pin...So all in all, there isn't much you can salvage because of the date of the machine and the propriety of dells designs

 

[mrogovin]

Thanks. I was hoping to save money but it sounds like a better solution is to buy a newer model, perhaps a used dual core, either Win7 or Linux (I tried to run a light linux distro on it but it just did not work well or even recognize network file storage HDD). Oh well... Hard part is figuring out all the processor models. I miss the days when it was easy to compare processors...