which cpu to choose and what size hard drive

I like to play around refurbishing old computers. I have a kinda cool older motherboard, Micro-Star International ms-6738 that could use a cpu upgrade but the manual has me a bit baffled. Could be I'm just not reading it correctly.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13159820/KM2M-ComboL-MS6738-Manual

It says:

CPU -
Socket A for AMD® Duron/Athlon/ XP processor.
Supports 1GHz to Athlon/ XP 2600+ processor

Its the 'to' in the second line that has me confused. Does that mean it will or will not support the xp 2600+ processor?

http://active-hardware.com/english/reviews/processor/xp2600.htm mentions that the Athlon xp 2600 runs at 2 GHz. The board has a Duron processor on it currently.

I'll run puppy linux or ubuntu on it eventually, but would also like to give it a new hard drive to replace the big 18 gb one it has now. I'm wondering just how much hard drive it would tolerate and still work reasonably well.

thanks in advance,

mystmaiden

 

That means that it will support upto and including the xp 2600+and that includes the Socket A Durons. The 2600+would be faster than the Duron processor. You should be able to run a 120Gb hdd on that board no problem. Those prices the second link gave are very old prices, if you can find a 2600+ you should be able to pick it up for about $10 or $20 US. Just 6 months ago I donated to a school 15 2600+ processors.

 

Thanks for the reply Dustjay, it was very helpful. I knew the prices were out of range, but it was a handy site for the specs. I've found the Athlon xp processor for less than 20 dollars, happily.

I'm running a 60 gb hard drive on my other machine that has an athlon xp cpu, I'm glad to know I can probably upgrade it too then. I start twitching when my hard drive gets over half full and that one's been way over that for a long time now


thanks again,

mystmaiden