Dell Dimension 9150 What should I do with it?

Stonker

Stonker

Stonker

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Joined
3 Nov 2012
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56
We had a power cut the other week and now it won't boot up. It looks like the disc has had it (I'm not sure if it uses RAID). It's a few years old now and runs a pentium processor of some sort. The graphics card went a few months ago so I replaced it.

Should I just replace the disc or is it worth upgrading?

I only use the machine for general work, MS office etc but would in the futore like to run Cubase 5 with an external sound card. The card I'm looking at has a firewire interface and I think It needs the Texas Instruments chipset. (I won't be needing to record many channels at once)

Could I use the machine for this or am I better looking at an i5 or 7 based machine and doing that properly?
 
But I've been out of work for 6 months and don't have money to burn. At a minimum, surely I could put a new hard drive in it?

Will it run Windoze 8 if I go for the upgrade offer at the moment?
 
You need an older Windows to use the upgrade copy.

As for your PC, does the Dell splash screen (or some sort of POST) show as soon as you turn on the PC? Can you enter BIOS? If you can, then you can simply replace the harddrive. If not, then it seems you will need to buy a new PC instead.
 
It has xp on it so I have the licence key for that.

I'll have to try it again but I get writing on the screen I think is says something about SATA which is what made me think it was a disk problem
 
budget - not really. Initially I just want to get it going but then would like to run cubase.

Would I need to upgrade the motherboard and processor?...erm....power supply?....cooling....
 
There are diagnostic lights on the front. 3 & 4 come on when I turn it on and there is a buzzer.

The manual says:

A possible floppy drive or hard drive
failure has occurred.
 
Stonker said:
budget - not really. Initially I just want to get it going but then would like to run cubase.

Would I need to upgrade the motherboard and processor?...erm....power supply?....cooling....
Click to expand...

Have a look in the bios and see if your hdd is detected.
Or stick your XP disc in and see if it will install.
No point in recommending upgrades until we know what is wrong with it.
 
The screen says Dell and the Bios counter starts at the bottom but then stops. Lights 1 & 4 are on and the manual doesn't say anything about that.

The graphics card I put in last year was a VTX 5750
 
Last edited:
Mmm...just tried it again.

I don't know why but since we had the graphics card changed, we have had to press F1 during the start up process. I've got that far.....

It's now sitting on the 'loading windows' page

(I did pull the cables off both hard drives and re-connect them)
 
I would suggest you download ultimatebootcd and burn it to disk. Boot with this DVD and it is full of diagnostic tools. Run a test on the HDD and see what it says
 
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