Upgrading My Old PC

Ok, I have an old pc with,
P75mhz or something close to it
64mb
Dead CD Rom
2 Harddisks, 0.5 and a 10gb

Ok... here goes...

I opened up the computer for the first time the other day, and I immediately crapped my pants. There were those really wide wires going every. First of all, I want to replace my CD. I haven't done any real upgrading before, so can anyone tell me where I should I plugging stuff in?

I know there is the really long cord, and I think there is a small one as well runnin from the back of the CD. Can I just unplug them and plug them into the new CD.

And here comes the hard one. I want to remove the 0.5 gb harddrive completly, make the 10gb harddrive the main one.
At the moment I think the Cd Drive plugs into the 0.5 gb and that plugs into motherboard. And the 10gb must plug into the mother board as well....

Ok so can someone point me in the direction of someone articles on upgrading? Or tell me what I need to be changing.

Thanks in advance.

Don't worry it's quite simple really - there are two IDE channels on the motherboard (hence the two ribbon cables coming out of it), each one allows two devices on it - one master and one slave.

All 3 of your drives should have jumper settings which allow you to set master/slave - the CD should be a slave and the hard drives should both be masters.

Right then, you main hard drive should be the master of IDE channel 1 (where your 0.5 is currently connected), you can safely have both other drives on channel 2 - so just swap the cables around at the motherboard end. (you have to go into your bios when you turn on and 'detect drives'

The CD drive has an extra cable for sound output, all modern CD drives have this, so you can safely swap the drive for a new one.


So your plan of attack -

1 - swap ribbon cables over at the motherboard (and bios- detect drives)

2 - swap the CD drive for a new one, making sure the new one is set to slave. (again, go into bios and detect drives)

What OS are you running to run? Certain free OSes don't need a CD-ROM if you have a NIC, and run great on old hardware if you don't use a GUI...

Umm its running Windows 95, it can't run anything higher or else it becomes unusable.

I was planning on replacing the CD Drive first and if all went well, then I might change the harddrives as well. I'll need the working harddrive to reinstall Windows.