WT5L Blog

In the past week, I have completed the latest round of major upgrades to the desktop computer that sits by and is connected to my amateur radio transceiver. Here are the details of this upgrade:

LCD Monitor

After years of working with nothing more than a 15″ CRT monitor at any of my desktop computers, I have now purchased a 24″ widescreen LCD monitor. The monitor is a Samsung Model 2494SW with a native resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. This unit was purchased from amazon.com for $201.45 with free shipping.

Video Graphics Card

When considering this monitor or any widescreen, high resolution monitor, I quickly realized the integrated video on the computer’s motherboard would not be up to the task of driving any such monitor at its native resolution. This realization led me to start looking for a suitable video graphics card. Specifically, I was looking for a AGP card since my motherboard had an unused AGP slot (Advanced Graphics Port). After some looking and comparing, I settled on a SPARKLE SF8855DT GeForce FX 5500 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP 4X/8X video card purchased from newegg.com for $34.99 plus $5.99 shipping. This graphics card features NVIDIA chipset and 256MB of video RAM. It also has has one D-SUB connector for analog video, one DVI connector for digital video, and S-Video connector for a TV connection. An image of this video card is shown below:

DVD-RW Drive

Now having access to a widescreen, high resolution LCD monitor, I then decided I needd to replace the very old CD-ROM drive that originally came with this computer. After a short search, I replaced this IDE drive with a Sony Optiarc Black 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X DVD+R DL 24X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD/CD Rewritable serial ATA (SATA) drive. Since this is an OEM drive, I also had to purchase the SATA power adapter and data cable. These items were purchased from newegg.com for $27.99 (drive), $5.79 (cables), and $8.13 shipping. (Total order: $41.91)

Hardware Integration

The video card and DVD drive were installed in the computer case with no issues. The XP system automatically detected and loaded a driver for the DVD drive and I manually loaded the drivers for the video card and for the monitor from the supplied disks. Despite working the issue for a while, I was unable to get the graphics card to drive the monitor at its native resolution via the digital DVI cable but was able to get the native resolution via the analog interface. (I was pre-warned of this potential problem from user feedback on the newegg.com site for this graphics card.) For now, I will stick with driving the monitor through the analog cable.

Summary

I have now replaced every hardware item in this computer except the legacy floppy disk drive that I never use. In previous upgrades, the motherboard, motherboard memory, and power supply were replaced and the operating system was upgraded from Windows 95/98 to Windows XP Home. With a widescreen monitor in place, I now have enough room on the display to place windows side-by-side instead of having to stack them on top of each other. This capability will be particularly useful during radio contests where I was continually having to swap windows around due to a lack of room on the screen.