hi, i have purchased an old processor, for my son, it is an hp e-pc, c10 model ref no p2792a evectra, it only has a 7.85gb hdd, i wonder if anyone could tell me if it is possible to buy a bigger hdd for it, i couldnt find it on hps website, i would like to get another few months use out of it before we buy a new cpu, thanx

Hi Lornnev and welcome to D-A-L

Windows reports hard disks as being slightly smaller than how the manufacturers describe them so, if it's telling you that it's 7.85Gb, it's probably really 8.4Gb. That was a standard size fitted in many PCs around 1997-2000. There are a couple of points at which PCs hit a size limit and, as far as I recall, 8.4Gb is one of those limits. So it may be that your hard disk is actually the biggest that your PC can support at the moment.

There may be a way around it, however. The BIOS is a system built into your motherboard that detects all of the bits of hardware that are connected inside your PC. It's the design of the BIOS that restricts it to only seeing 8.4Gb of a hard disk (even if you fitted a 20Gb drive, the PC would still think it was 8.4Gb). Fortunately, in some cases, it is possible to get a BIOS upgrade - a program that you run on the PC that updates the BIOS software with new instructions for detecting bigger hard disks etc. Let me see if I can find details of a BIOS update for your PC. If I can, I'll be back in 10 minutes

Incidentally, the "processor" or "CPU" is only a very small part of the big box that you plug everything into. What you're actually referring to is more commonly called the "base unit"

Here's a link to the technical reference manual for your PC (56 pages in Adobe Acrobat PDF format):

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/su...1/lpv06981.pdf

Looks like a nice little PC. They actually fitted them with 8.4Gb, 10Gb or 20Gb hard disks so that shows that, in fact, your PC has been built with a BIOS system that overcomes the 8.4Gb limit. So the good news is that you can fit any sized hard disk you like. The only thing that you need to ensure is that it is an IDE drive and not a SATA drive.

If you're thinking of fitting a bigger hard drive IN ADDITION to the original hard drive, make sure you have an available drive bay to screw it into and a spare internal power connector and grey IDE ribbon cable connector. I expect that the manual that I've given you the link for will tell you this.

Hope that helps - let us know if that answers your question and we can close this thread for you