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It has become time to replace the antiques

As you may remember about 6 months ago my XP computer at my apartment died of a motherboard seizure the only parts still working are the three ATA hard drives.
and the ATA CD and DVD burners. Hope I can find a new system that will allow me to connect the ata drives as at least slaves since most of what I see out there have SATA support but no mention in the docs about ATA. But I was doing fine because I still had my Acer Aspire to get on line at my apartment. Nice little net book Smile
As you know I have been finding odd errors with the mods I been testing on my relatives computer. I figured I was having either a memory error or video card issue. So I decided to run a memory diagnostic. It was then I discovered I could not enter the system bios to change the boot order so that I could run the mem test from my flash drive. I am almost never in the room when the computer boots up so did not notice it was not going through the normal POST where it lists the drives memory and such and allows you to press DEL to enter the bios or F2 to change the boot order. I figured reset the bios but wanted to make sure I was right so I spoke with two people who's technical advise I trust more than my own.
They suggested the same So I looked for the bios reset jumper and of course there was not on. So I unplugged the computer, Removed the battery, ate dinner,
replaced the battery, plugged the computer back in pressed the start button and it now does nothing except spin up the hard drive, blink the cd light and floppy disk lite, yes it has a floppy drive all my computer do. So what if I am old school. Anyway it is now time for two new computers. I can not afford a lot of money but I do want a good system that will
A: allow me to hook up my ATA hard drives (not via USB but a Motherboard ATA connector.
B: allow me to set up a duel boot system so that I can access either the XP OS or the Windows 7 OS. NO I WILL NOT USE WINDOWS 8 it is too dam new. I am loath to even consider using windows 7 but with Microsoft Ending support for XP I have little choice.

In the past I have built from scratch every computer I have ever owned. I have never purchased a computer off the shelf so to speak. I will not purchase a computer over the Internet either. I must Touch it and see inside the case prior to paying for it. I would not want something that I could not upgrade or tweak on. Also it must be a Desk Top because I want everything inside and not hanging off USB cables and sitting all over my desk.

Hey just wondering do computers these days have parallel ports, and PS2 connectors for Keyboards. You do not know what a PS2 connector is it is a round connector with 6 pins. If they do not my custom keyboards may not function. I know they make PS2 to USB adapters or at least they did. But as some of you are aware my left arm and hand have some sever limitations. So my keyboards are unique.

Anyway to much rambling.
Elf

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Comments

My new computer I bought earlier this year has a PS2 connecter.

there are sata to ide molex adapters, I use in my P4, work well

Thanks DE and PhoeniX I guess things have not passed me by as far as I thought. useful things to keep in mind when searching for new puter.

they actually have stuff like these SATA to IDE/IDE to SATA Drive Interface Adapter that converts your parallel-ata drives to sata so that they can connect to sata motherboards.

one drawback is that the converter board requires a floppy power connector but some of em provide a molex to floppy converter wire for free with the drive adapter. another drawback is that they could be glitchy and buggy with some sata motherboards refusing to detect a drive converted/connected in this way.

any fairly recent motherboard from 2008 or earlier shud still have parallel ata connectors, parallel ports and ps2 ports on the board. i'd go for one of the lga 775 boards based on the intel 965p chipset like these: gigabyte 965p-ds3. on the back panel it has 1 serial and 1 parallel port and ps2 kb and mouse ports plus one parallel-ata port onboard.

do note that the recent PCs post-2010 only come with one ps2 connector for either the kb or the mouse but not both together at the same time...

good thing about it is that it supports those 3ghz core 2 quad extreme cpus which is great for heavy multitasking and yet still provides good enuff per core performance (as its 3ghz) for running single-threaded games like ds2.

if u are a storage whore like me and really must have plenty of parallel-ata connectors, there's this foxconn 945p7aa board with 3 pata connectors allowing 6 pata drives to be connected in total. tho one drawback is that it only supports those pentium 4 prescotts which run superhot and have to run with noisy powerful cooling fans as a result.

lastly, u can also get these pci and pci express parallel-ata expansion cards to connect even more drives.

ok, i shall stop now lest my post gets detected as an adbot spamming stuff for sales and gets deleted. Laughing out loud :mrgreen: