Desktop Upgrade

[rac]

First thanks everyone for all the information on this forum.I come home at night and read at all the builds and inprovements everyone is making.Now my question is my wife's computer is a hp pavilion a1410n.She want's to make it better.Mostly has photos and music on it.Just ordered 4 sticks of ram and a 1 tr hard drive.Is there anything else that can be done without setting it aside and starting over that can be done. Thanks again for information.

 

[2048Megabytes]

Defragment the hard drive and run Ccleaner on it. Doing those two things will clean up your hard drive and make the system run more efficiently.

You can download Ccleaner here:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

You are probably also using Windows XP 32-bit on this computer. Windows XP will only utilize around 3.25 gigabytes of RAM if you put 4 gigabytes of memory in it. Don't worry about this because 3,328 megabytes of RAM (or 3.25 gigabytes) is a lot of memory.

 

[salvage-this]

The 4gb that you just put in over the 1gb will already make a huge difference. I would see what it runs like before you make any huge adjustments. Although if money is not a huge issue there are dual core processors out there that should be compatible with your motherboard. I just typed in socket 939 cpu x2 in google and I got a few hits 2.0-2.6 dual core AMD processors. these were $150 and above so unless she is having a lot of trouble with the computer freezing while multitasking, I would just leave it alone.

Is there anything more specific that you want to improve? I'm sure that there are people on this forum that have a better idea than I do.

good luck!