My Dumb Question of the Day...

I just picked up a Digital Starion 919 (it was free, best price I could find). I would like to upgrade it to something that can actually be used but I cannot find a montherboard that will fit in the **** thing. I spent half an hour on google.com looking for the company website & could not find anything. Any help would be appreciated...

 

Hi Damien

I do some upgrading. The best thing I have found is to work with the motherboard, check it's capabilities and if you can find parts that work on it. When you change the motherboard you have virtually started building another computer. It would probably be easier to get a cheap case that your new motherboard will fit into, but then there are questions of:
Will the Power Supply swap over?
Is the RAM compatible? Will it need more?
How long before the Hard Drive becomes too small?
Can the Video be swapped/upgraded?

Is it possible to do modest upgrades with the current motherboard and save your "hard earns" toward a new machine, then network the two? The older machine would run the smaller/older software the new runs the latest.

I have wiped hard drives and installed "bare bones" systems (eg. Win 95 instead of Win 98, just Word instead of Office or just a small antivirus instead of Norton Systemworks) and they FLY. Maybe a new OS and the latest drivers may work some magic.

Anyway, hope there's some food for thought here. Maybe you could give us more information on what your future plans are.

Matt

 

Digital Starion service manual:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/legacysupport/digital/pdf/star9xx.pdf