So let me tell you about the machine. I was at my local Pc Recycling shop. And siting on there shelve was a older model Alienware Aurora refurred to as a m7500 i think anyways the system specs where as follows. Amd Athlon 64 dual core 2.60 each core 80 gig hard drive (thank god it wasn't ide when i bought this thank god it's a sata. 2 gig's of ram included windows xp professional sp2 edition with cd's so i noticed the previous owners where in the process of upgrading the machine brand new spanking new power supply 810 watts they had just installed a ati radeon x1900 (god i hate this card its so big and balky it adds 20 pounds just to the computer itself. so i decided why not for $119.00 out the door i couldn't pass it up. so i started the project of finishing the upgrade and updating the ram graphics card and even hard drives. So for upgrading this machine this is what i changed it over to. Amd athlon 64 dual core 4 gig's of ram 1- 1tb hard drive western digital green drive 1- 80 gig western digital hard drive (the stock hard drive was clean and looked like new so i decided to reuse it as a music storage drive) installed windows vista x64 home basic on it until i can afford a copy of windows 7 just temporary of course and i purchased a cheap graphics card because i am not a heavy computer gamer so i dont need a real heavy card so i purchased a radeon hd 6450 2gb ddr3 Direct x 11 Stereoscopic 3d supported so for a total of 200.00 how do you think i faired on upgrading someone elses project and could i do more and a question i have is a raid a good thing or a bad thing because this supports a raid controller
UPDATE: Just finished purchasing a new monitor a element 28 inch led for 100.00 couldn't pass it up decided to go to windows 8 instead of windows 7 because my rule if you have the money for 8 go 8 if you have the money for 7 go 7!!! added 5.1 surround sound to the computer via optical output!!!! (portal and doom 3 rock with this) added 4 gig's of ram finally added two more 1tb hard drives modded the case with some new goodies blue and red leds and fans also gave the case a new paint job
