[PrismGate]

Is it possible to upgrade an old Compaq 7885 desktop, Pentium III @ 700 Mhz, so that it will allow a 80 gig hard drive.

Compaq says max 40 gig.

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Technically, you can.

Odds are, though, it may not work very well.

Plus, it's pre-built, and some prebuilt computers don't take to upgrading very well.

Honestly, instead of upgrading your hard drive, get a new processor! I reccomend AMD over Intel myself. I've got an older processor, but it's 1.8 gHz. It makes a big difference.

If you really want the hard drive, I say go ahead and give it a try. Worst case scenario, you take your hard drive back to the store, right?

[fluffybaka]

Technically, you can.

Odds are, though, it may not work very well.

Plus, it's pre-built, and some prebuilt computers don't take to upgrading very well.

Honestly, instead of upgrading your hard drive, get a new processor! I reccomend AMD over Intel myself. I've got an older processor, but it's 1.8 gHz. It makes a big difference.

If you really want the hard drive, I say go ahead and give it a try. Worst case scenario, you take your hard drive back to the store, right?

[Tyger]

I would say you can. At the very most you will lose the time and trouble it takes to install it, you can always use it on another computer as a slave if you replace that one. In fact, unless your current drive is bad or too slow, it might be better to make it the slave. I put an 80gb drive with 8mb cache in an HP with a 466 mhz CPU and it works very well, is much crisper in operation thanks to the higher speed and larger cache.

You can put the drive in as a slave and go into setup and see if the BIOS sees it, if it doesn't you will need to install the overlay software so that it will be loaded at boot up.

Something else you can do to improve older machines is check with the MoBo and chipset manufacturers to see if there are any BIOS and chipset driver upgrades. They can make a marked improvement in performance and best of all, they're usually free.