Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - Newbie question, power supply, motherboard...

**PanamaGal** · 12-23-2006, 09:23 PM

Your grief was likely caused by a very cheap and bad power supply. Your hard drives may very well have failed due to that power supply; but there is really no way to know. Your motherboard will handle a larger drive than 120gb. Get a 320gb if you like. You just need to make sure you get the right interface, PATA or SATA. You also need a quality power supply. I'd go for a nice 450-500W. Some brands to look at are Seasonic (my favorite), Silverstone, Antec, Fortron (a good value), and Zalman. Please, please, please, do not go cheap with a power supply. This is likely the single biggest mistake many people make when building or upgrading. There is an excellent power supply sticky you should read at the beginning of this section. Last, if you have a question, ask here, not Dell, as one can believe very little of what they say.

12-23-2006, 09:23 PM	#3 (permalink)
PanamaGal Mentor Hardware Team Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Panama Posts: 1,240 OS: WinXP Pro SP2; Windows Server 2003; Windows Vista Ultimate; Vista Business	Your grief was likely caused by a very cheap and bad power supply. Your hard drives may very well have failed due to that power supply; but there is really no way to know. Your motherboard will handle a larger drive than 120gb. Get a 320gb if you like. You just need to make sure you get the right interface, PATA or SATA. You also need a quality power supply. I'd go for a nice 450-500W. Some brands to look at are Seasonic (my favorite), Silverstone, Antec, Fortron (a good value), and Zalman. Please, please, please, do not go cheap with a power supply. This is likely the single biggest mistake many people make when building or upgrading. There is an excellent power supply sticky you should read at the beginning of this section. Last, if you have a question, ask here, not Dell, as one can believe very little of what they say. __________________ It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.