Over the last couple of weeks some of our club members have been actively involved in the refurbishment of several computers that are used by the club for Internet browsing.
These computers were originally bought from Bowlers computer market in Manchester at a very
good price.
They came as complete working machines with hard drive, cd rom, memory and cpu.
The task of un boxing the old motherboards
and fitting into new cases that the club purchased from our local computer shop
Lightning Computers, gave those members who were carrying out the refurbishment an insight into how you would tackle the job of putting together a system of their own.











As these machines are not super fast, 1Ghz CPU, they are well suited for internet browsing, and have also been fitted with 4 port usb2 internal pci cards again acquired from the computer market.

Before fitting the motherboards into their new home the new cases had to be prepared to receive them by fitting the supplied spacers that the board sits on,

and removing the punched back plate to fit the existing one matched to the motherboards as shown below.

The couple of photo’s below show the finished re box with motherboard, hard drive and cd rom fitted along with the new usb2 card.

Did the newly refurbished machines work when powered up?
“Yes they did.”
The operating system that was originally loaded on these PC’s was Millennium, which will be upgraded to Windows XP Pro over the next few months.
This will allow members who are not familiar with loading operating software to see how it’s done hands on from fitting and preparing the hard drive by partitioning and formatting before loading the operating system.
There are plans to fit dvd writers to these PC’s when all other work is completed.
There are six computers in total that will have been refurbished and I’m sure that the club members who have been involved will have gained knowledge and a better understanding of what is inside and what goes on in these black boxes.

"Well Done Lads...." Next Project!!