HP a810n cooked northbridge

[Guest]

It's my wife's old desktop & runs Win XP SP3. It began to lock up mid task, no response to input devices , last display intact. Restart usually but not always worked. I discovered the Northbridge chip's heat-sink in the bottom of the case. I bought some heat-sink cement and re-glued it. That only extended the runtime to 1st failure. I was able to copy off all "My documents" & Mozilla profiles off it for her new Vaio laptop. I'd like to revive it to preserve the Canon Lide 30 support(no Win Vista or 7 drivers exist for it) The Salmon MB is still available, mostly refurbs, for $69-240. I think I can get an AII x2 CPU, MB, 2-4GB DDR2-3, CPU cooler, and a PCI PATA card(I've seen no AII compatible MB with 2 PATA connectors, the a810n has 3 PATA devices) for ~$150-200 from either Microcenter or Tigerdirect who both have "local"stores and that'll stretch its usefulness for other things as well. I'm wondering if the power supply will handle it.

 

[rolli59]

One of these http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=31&name=Barebone-PC-Kits& install XP as OS and skip one of the PATA optical drives.