greetings fellow geeks of the world:

i'm ready to take the next step and do some upgrading so i made a date with new egg and they made a delivery of a Kingston ValueRAM 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)(can't believe i've been dealing with 640mb for nearly 5 years), a SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model SH-S222A - OEM (with no instructions which is why i guess it's called oem), Seagate 320GB External Hard Drive, and a belkin 7 port usb hub. i kinda wish i got a new internal hard drive but i figured i can clear some space on the internal by using the external. so here's what i'm actually upgrading:

dell deminsions 4400
windows xp home sp3
pentium 4 cpu 1.60 ghz
640mb ram
20 gb ide western digital hard drive (may upgrade within the month)
lite-on ltr-24102m cd-rw (which stopped writing early 2009. lost upper and lower filters and now it only reads but not cd-rw)

since i'm replacing the cd-rw with a dvd burner/cd-rw, how do i go about performing this task? do i pull out the old drive or use the 2nd bay under it? i don't have a static wrist guard and i have carpeting everywhere so i'm a little nervous about opening the pc this time around (i had no problems adding memory last time since i had hard wood floors). if you can offer detailed instructions on how to install the new drive, i would greatly appreciate it.

thanks to all of you for your help in advance.

btw, let's go YANKEES!!!

Hi,

You might want to go here and make sure you have your documentation, and DO be sure to read it!
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4400/

Next, get yourself a wrist-strap. In a good computer store, you might find one for $1 in a "Specials" bin. That's all they're worth, but otherwise just waste a few dollars and get one anyway. You don't HAVE to. The other way is to always ground yourself out on some metal part of the case, and to make sure, as you work, that some available skin (usually your arm or your fingers) stays in touch with case metal. But you should beware that the electrostatic charge (i.e. shock) that can wreck your components can be so small that you don't feel it yourself. Be careful about this invisible danger, because it is always there and always a threat.

You don't want your CD-RW any more? Well, you don't need it, and it is true that you don't want unnecessary drives in your machine. Personally, I tend to keep things, myself, so I'd probably put the new DVD-RW in the top bay and keep the CD-RW, reassigned to the next bay down. You are more correct than I am if you just get rid of the CD. Your decision.

Quite often these things come out the front of the case—with surprising ease. Working with the side panel off, you should find the way to do it with no trouble. But you can just look at the manual I steered you to, and you'll find beautifully-drawn diagrams waiting for you under "Installing Other Drives".

See what you can do with that, take it easy, enjoy yourself and memorize the following advice:

SPEED SLOWLY

You can use that for a lot more than fixing up computers.

Have fun, and good luck.

thank you for you response. i will certainly head over to the site and check it out. as for the wrist strap, i think i'll spend the dollar or 2 and pick 1 up just to be on the safe side.
speed slowly is a good motto. mind if i put it on a t-shirt?

whoa! this documentation is exactly what i needed and the pictures are perfect. i just looked at the link and i'm going to print this out.

This post has been edited by peaceandcheese: Oct 18 2009, 11:48 AM

Sure, T-shirts are good. Hm. One word on the front; one on the back!

[If you like printing things out, I suggest you get yourself a .PDF app (such as Peernet) and then you can print to .PDF. Excellent fast way to save tons of things to your files. Er—and a fast .PDF reader such as Foxit goes well with that. Just a suggestion.]