Ancient PC upgrade

[Moscow Mule]

My uncle, who is a cheapskate, has an old PC which is now very slow.

I've ordered some new RAM from crucial, which will be easy to do.

Problem is his hard-drive which appears to be on the way out.

This is his system spec:

1
SEPTEMBER 19B INTEL PENTIUM 4 PROCESSOR1
{DIMENSION 4500}P4 2.53GHZ/512K,  INTEGRA1
256MB 266MHZ DDR RAM MEMORY,  (1X256MB)1
40GB IDE (5,400RPM) HARD DRIVE

Will I be able to

1) plug this in - http://www.dabs.com/products/western...?refs=52420000
2) boot from the CD and re-install WinXP on new drive?

Basically - is an ATA-100 drive the same as IDE?

[DiscoStu]

Tell him he needs a new one, otherwise you're about to become his lifetime technical support. Everything that goes wrong from this point on will, in his mind, be caused by you upgrading it.

A slightly more helpful answer, yes, that drive should be fine. Make sure you have all the drivers before you do an XP re-install. There's an app that will back up all the existing drivers and then allow you to re-install them, but its name temporarily eludes me...

ETA: Could you talk him into buying something like this instead? Saves arsing around with the old one for pretty much the same cost as memory and an HDD

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Tee hee - that PC (your Uncle's) is better than the one I've just upgraded to Windows 7 and put MS Office on - and it's not bad. I know it's pointless but as well as being an early adopter of some stuff I refuse to let go other stuff. I bought a new DVD drive for it as I couldn't boot from USB (BIOS too old to support it) and the win 7 uses a 3gb ISO image to boot from.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Tee hee - that PC (your Uncle's) is better than the one I've just upgraded to Windows 7 and put MS Office on - and it's not bad. I know it's pointless but as well as being an early adopter of some stuff I refuse to let go other stuff. I bought a new DVD drive for it as I couldn't boot from USB (BIOS too old to support it) and the win 7 uses a 3gb ISO image to boot from.

EDIT - I googled XP boot disc and found some bloke's tutorial on how to create a boot disc from what's on your PC already. Mine didn't work though :-(

[Moscow Mule]

Cheers.

Also for tip about drivers - handy.

[tommyc]

Discostu is right. Definitely don't offer to help..

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers

[TheFaQQer]

Discostu is right. Definitely don't offer to help..

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers

That is SO true, I've just sent the link to my brother. I've spoken to him three times this year - to solve the same spoof anti-virus pop-up thing each time.

[Moscow Mule]

I am locking that bastard down when I've reinstalled it...