desktop upgrade (1 Viewer)

[melb22]

Right now i have a desktop comp with

intel P4 cpu 2 ghz
768(512+256) mb of ram
Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 - 64 mb
hard disk - 200 GB
win xp service pace 2

The comp is quite old, around 3 years old. I dont play any games. Use it just to surf net, music/movies, office applications. Since the motherboard is old and not really a good one, I cant upgrade the cpu to anything faster..

i want to wait for 12-18 months b4 i get a new comp as it is doing reasonably alright. But i want to upgrade. I am planning to get a better graphics card so i can use the aero feature in vista. other then that I can have upto 2 gb of ram on my motherboard.

Generally the apps that are running on the comp would be zonealarm, firefox with around 5-6 tabs, msn/yahoo messenger, window media player for music and sometime some office app. Now because of that it slows the comp down and when a new application is opened it takes around 10-15 secs to open

Now if get more ram on the comp, since it is old i use the 2100 ddram. Would it make any difference if i add more ram to the comp. Or it doesnt make much difference since i already have 768 mb ???? Is there anything else i can buy/upgrade on the comp to make it faster?

 

[mr_brightside]

Just buy a new computer if you want vista.

 

[sthcross.dude]

The specs uve posted seem pretty adequate for ur web surfing activities. Have u checked ur comp is not full of spyware. Also you probably have heaps of unecessary programs running in the background, go to startup and remove them from running when u start ur comp. Also delete unecessary shit of desktop. If that doesnt work maybe ur fans and stuff are old.

I wont go on because there so much shit about this on other forums, but i would definately look into other ways to speed it up which can save hardware upgrades. I did a few of these simple things recently and it sped my comp up alot.

 

[sthcross.dude]

oh sorry i didnt read u wanted vista.

only solution is to buy a new comp. trying to run it on that would be a nightmare.

 

[bboundy]

You dont need to spend too much. I just built my own comp for around $600 and it runs vista just fine (base score of 4.2)

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/bboun...photo?authkey=MMqBJ1xcfXs#5084691402118679602

 

[Serius]

600 bucks? musta been a real heap then lawl.

 

[melb22]

I dont have any spyware/adware as i use ad aware/spybot on the comp. When the comp starts. only the antivirus program runs in the background, rest i have removed already through msconfig. So what i want to know is if i keep win xp,then upgrade my comp from 768(512+256) mb to 1.5(1+ 512) gb of ram, how much difference will it make???

 

[mr_brightside]

Not alot.

RAM isn't that effective in making your computer faster.
plus if you're upgrading yr ram (^____^) you will get better speeds if you match the chips.
Get a better processor, faster harder drive.

 

[Slidey]

You don't need an upgrade friend. Remove viruses/spyware... if that's not working, reformat it - trust me this will fix your problem. This is better and cheaper.

And overlock that mofo!