Pc Upgrade Help

Alkers

I have a 2 year old Dell Dimension 4500 that is recently getting very slow.
Am on summer holidays as of now so deceided to do something about it.
Specs:
P4 2.0ghz
Intel 845E chipset, support for 266Mhz DDR Ram
Agp 4x, nVidia Geforce2 MX 64mb overclocked from 175mhz/334mhz to 200mhz/400mhz
256mb DDR RAM
40gb Hard Disk
Creative Sound Blaster Live
Will be formatting hard disk and getting XP professional up over the weekend (currently on Xp home)
Any suggestions how to make it faster? Willing to try anything, spend arond €200 I'd say depending on results. Is it true you cant overclock the CPU in a dell? How far could I go with the Geforce, is it worth buying some sort of heatsink for it?

subway_ie

Any particular reason for going from XP Home to XP Professional?

Alkers

Not really, it cost's more and I'm getting it for free so I decided I may as well, what's the difference. If anyone could give me a rough value on this p.c. would be great aswell, thanks.

silverside

just add another 256 RAM (€45), and a hard disk (something like a 120GB 7200 Samsung Spinpoint) (€90) and keep your eyes out for something like a 9600 graphics card going secondhand. XP pro definitely needs 512MB for good performance.

A P4 2.0 isnt that slow - should get another year or two out of that yet.

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by silverside
just add another 256 RAM (€45), and a hard disk (something like a 120GB 7200 Samsung Spinpoint) (€90) and keep your eyes out for something like a 9600 graphics card going secondhand. XP pro definitely needs 512MB for good performance.

A P4 2.0 isnt that slow - should get another year or two out of that yet.

Where can you get those prices on RAM and a HD?

Squall

http://www.komplett.ie/k/kl.asp?bn=10235

Theres some 256 chips there for €50ish

http://www.komplett.ie/k/kl.asp?bn=10089

The western digital drives here are a nice price

RicardoSmith

Close enough. Cheers.

silverside

I was doing a back-of-the-envelope conversion of the sterling prices from overclockers.co.uk

subway_ie

Originally posted by silverside
I was doing a back-of-the-envelope conversion of the sterling prices from overclockers.co.uk

You'll get those prices from JES-Computer, for the hard drive at least - not too sure about the memory. I just got a 160GB Samsung for about €95 from them. This usually have good prices on memory, plus they're an Irish company with free delivery to Ireland and the UK. Generally, buying off of Komplett or Jes-Computer works out cheaper than buying from Overclockers - the only thing is, Overclockers might be a bit faster with delivery.

Alkers

Don't really need more hard disk space, would a new hard disk speed it up? Is it true you cant overclock the CPU in a dell? How far could I go with the Geforce, is it worth buying some sort of heatsink for it or should I fork out on a new one altogether? Any ideas on how much I cold sell this for? Thanks again

subway_ie

I suppose you might get about €400, depending on where you sell it. Generaly, selling it on boards you won't get as much as you would selling it to somebody who wouldn't know very much about computers, say in Buy & Sell or somewhere.

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by Simona1986
Don't really need more hard disk space, would a new hard disk speed it up? Is it true you cant overclock the CPU in a dell? How far could I go with the Geforce, is it worth buying some sort of heatsink for it or should I fork out on a new one altogether? Any ideas on how much I cold sell this for? Thanks again

Only if you buy a very fast and expensive hard disk. You can't overclock the dell no. But you can swap the CPU for something faster if it is a socket 478 motherboard and not a socket 423 motherboard. Its likely you have socket 428 board though.

However you'd see a big speed improvement (in games) upgrading to 512mb of ram and changing that graphics card to something modern. The GF2MX is a very slow card. Something like a 9600XT/9800, or FX5900LX or better would make a huge difference even without changing the CPU.

Your CPUis a 400fsb bus CPU so you can only upgrade to a 400fsb CPU. The max is a 2.6ghz CPU I think. But you'd better changing the graphic card first, then adding ram, then changing the CPU. In fact I doubt I'd bother changing the CPU.

The machine is worth about 400 max I'd say. You won't sell it for that on the boards though.

Alkers

Well I won't be silling it for anywhere around that, think I'll go ahead and get some more RAM.