What kind of games are you playing? It's hard to imagine your system having much life left, to be totally honest. You're basically throwing your money into a bottomless pit because no amount is going to bring that system up to par with today's games.
Heck, I'll even donate an Athlon X2 4600 and some DDR2 RAM (either PC2-4200 or 5300) to you if you were going to go for a new build. That's how sad it makes me to see someone trying to keep a system like that alive...
hey, I still use a 1.2ghz celeron as a media computer, even still has IGP for main graphics, works and I'm not going to upgrade until it dies. runs XP btw and mobo only supports up to 512mb RAM. having a virus problem now, but ubuntu still works great on it, now if only I can clean the window viruses.
hi, thanks for the reply i was upgrading the graphics so i could playbgames which need shader which the onboard card does not have. i would like to upgrade the processor to a P4 but i think i can only go to 2.2 i have read that you go as far as 2.8 and the memory which is 640 mb i am hoping to go to around 3 gb. if i go for the graphics card that will be around $60, processor around $20 plus the memory around $30 which will a total of around $110 what do you think. this is just ideas at present.
what I read from the site was your computer supports up to 2.2ghz northwood, which the general consensus even when they were "new" was that it didn't make sense to upgrade from a 1.7ghz to 2.2ghz. the only thing would be you have a celeron processor (according to you) which what I read was, they're slightly slower than the p4's. but another source said the later celerons were closer to p4 speeds. you can pick up a 2.2ghz or even 2.0ghz p4 for $10 or so, check ebay or craigslist. the RAM would be your biggest improvement as you are quadrupling it (practically), but your mobo only supports up to 2gb of RAM, so getting 3 would be useless.
Again, I'll say, don't spend more than $50 on a PCI card, you WILL want to upgrade the system in a year or 2 and that $50 is being wasted on an aging system. as opposed to buying a power supply with 20+4 connector which can be reused in a newer machine. find a used PCI card on ebay, craigslist, or local swap meet, can probably pick up a 128mb or even a 256mb for $25 or so. all in all, you will spend about $50-60 upgrading processor, RAM, and vid card, and that will keep your machine running long enough till next year or 2 when a newer game you're interested in comes out. and then you can build a core2 machine, since it will be considered "older" technology for a lot cheaper than if you were to build one now.
you and me are the people who live 1-2 steps behind in the computer world, but we don't need to be on the cutting edge if the machines are doing what we need them to. Like I said, I'm still on a win2k machine and IGP graphics, I still play WoW, or other games of the like. If I wanted to play a top of the line newer game, I would pay the money, but these older games work just fine for me.
