HARDWARE - Have a Legacy System?

Is your PC a Legacy System?

In this case I am talking about the hardware in your system being "old." The problem is getting hardware replacements because they are no longer manufactured.

But don't give up. There are many suppliers who specialize on stocking legacy hardware or even entire systems.

For example, my Desktop System at home is legacy because:

• I use IDE drives (2 ports)


• AGP8X video port


• Floppy

I just have too much on my drives, etc., to do a complete reinstall if I wanted to upgrade (for example) an Intel Core 2 processor motherboard. Or at least I thought so at the time.

When I first looked at Intel Core 2 motherboards, they came with only one IDE port, some had no Floppy port, and none had an AGP port.

I did upgrade, but to a legacy motherboard that could use a Pentium 4, LGA775 socket, 3GHz, Hyper Threading. So I get very good speeds even with high-resource games like Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 2, or Fallout 3.

The other day, because my video card started to go, I was searching around via Google, and lo-and-behold I found a motherboard WITH all the legacy support I needed AND could use Intel Core 2 LGA775 socket! Also, I could use my existing Processor if I wanted to.

It is the P4M800PRO-M (V2.0) motherboard from ECS Elitegroup. AND I could (and did) order it from Amazon (for a very good price), in addition to a Intel Core 2, 3GHz, LGA775 socket. Even better, it supports 2gb max memory, but two different types Memory Sticks (4 memory slots, 2 of each type), including the memory I already have.

This means, when my present motherboard goes out, I'll have an upgrade motherboard ready.

This is just to show my readers not to give up on upgrading or repairing your system at low cost.

Why did I order a replacement motherboard when I don't need one now? It is still a legacy motherboard and ECS does not manufacture it any more. So I got it while I could.

By the way, the Google search string I used (including the quotes):
motherboard "lga775 socket" agp8x

There were other variations, but that was the basic search line.