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This is just a minor update with very little apart from a few photos of the pc. The case is the usual fairly uninspiring mix of black/gray and in the photos you can see the extention I had to make for the power switch cable.

One thing of note is i will use the migration wizard to copy as much as I can from the old pc to the new. Vista has already informed me that it will only be able to copy files rather than profiles and themes etc because the old OS is windows 2000.

The last photo is the spares I had left over, for it seems years now dell like putting overly large fans in their cases and then putting an awkward plastic cover to direct the airflow.

Right then my mums pc is rather long in the tooth these days, something along the lines of a 800mhz p3 with 192 megs and a ropey and no doubt failing 40gig hdd. So I thought I’d upgrade it a bit at least so I don’t have to wait so long when I need to do things to it. So off to a popular auction website I went and after a few days purusing and contemplating I opted to get a machine that is being sold as faulty (partly because its cheap and partly because I love tinkering).

The item I won was a dell dimension 1100 tower pc with 512MB ddr 400 ram 2.5ghz p4 processor, and all the usual drives etc for around £30 which I didn’t think was too bad considering the spec of the machine, theres got to be aleast £30 of usable working parts in there.

So the machine arrived I plugged it in and booted it, the fans would spin for a second and then the pc would shutdown. Also I discovered there was no HDD with the machine which wasn’t really a biggie. So after a bit of fiddling and swapping of parts with another machine I discovered the RAM seems to be working ok as does the CPU which is the result I was hoping for.

So online shopping I went again and bought an ASROCK P4VM900-SATA2 motherboard and a Samsung 40gig sata hdd (that was on special offer for £15). When the items arrived I duly installed the motherboard in the dell case. This required a few minor modifcations to the case. The main one was the power connector lead wasn’t long enough to reach the new motherboard connection point. Also the arrangement of the power/reset/hdd light connectors were proprietary so I clipped off the connector and soldered on an extra bit of wire to the power switch lead and wound some insulation tape around it(which luckily I had salvaged years ago from a dead pc thinking they might come in handy).

Initially after I had put it all together and booted it preparing to load an os onto it the machine wouldn’t post again, but after a bit of fiddling that seems to now be resolved, I had diagnosed that if it happens again then it may well be the power supply that requires replacing but I’ll worry about that if it occurs again.

Overall I think I’ve spent about £70 on the project which if nothing else happens I don’t think is too bad for the spec of machine I have got. Also when I take out the old machine I’ll probably stick some more memory in it and put another copy of server 2003 (only for small functions) and add it to my domain for testing.

I’ll post some pics of the dell (especially the minor mods I’ve had to make) later and let you know how I get on installing an OS and stress testing it before it goes out for upgrade.

Well after a couple of months of gentle learning I’ve just booked my 270 exam for some time before the end of the year (come on im not telling you that), this means I now have just a few weeks to get down to it and do some proper studying. I’ve also bought the measureup practice test software to help me figure out what I need to concerntrate on. As always I never feel ready for to take an exam but there comes a time when you just have to book it and then get your head down and hope for the best.

On another note I’ve installed Vista Ultimate with my technet subscription and also have managed to shoehorn xp drivers for my wifi card onto it. At the moment I’ve only really had time to install it, and probably wont do anything else with it until I’ve got through the 270. anyway the hard work begins now!

Hi all,

I’ve got my first 290 book in, as I think its a good idea to start studying it whilst studying for the 270. Some of the content bleeds over between exams.
I bought the MS press training guide ( there was a debate if I should go for this of the exam cram one first), looking at the first couple of chapters I was plesently surprised. The 271-272 training guides I didnt really like very much, but i suspect that it was because I had nearly finished studying for the exams anyway so all the screen grabs etc in the book wasnt that new too me.

You get some nice extras with the book too (I got very similar things with the 271-272 books so it must be the same across the range). You get the obligatory 15% disocunt voucher for MS exams and you get trial software of the exam in question (so in this case it was 180 day trial of server 2k3 enterprise edition), You also get some Measureup practice tests for the exams and a couple of related ebooks. So I think for the £25 of thereabouts for the book I think its quite good value. Of course I wont be relying on one book for my source of info and I have been admining 2k3 servers abit at work, so i already have some knowledge of it.

Anyway I must concerntrate on passing the 270 so will mostly be swotting up on that in the comming weeks.