making a old computer faster

which one should i do?

  • buy the parts?

    Votes: 2 50.0%

  • wipe the HDD?

    Votes: 2 50.0%
  • Total voters
    4
starlitjoker

starlitjoker

New Member
my mother has a gateway 5464 and it has a 1.6 Ghz pentium dual core and 1 gb of RAM. her computer is INCREDIBLY slow. she only has 70 gb of stuff out of 300 so here are the choices to make it faster

1. buy a 2.7 Ghz pentium dual core and 2X1 GB of kingston RAM?

2. put all her files on a external HDD and wipe the drive and reinstall everything?
 
Before going that drastic so soon, what operating system is on it? Have you ran Ccleaner and deleted all the temp files? Have you stopped unnecessary programs from running at bootup? Scanned for malware/viruses? If its running XP then it shouldn't be slow at all.
 
ok sorry for that,

windows vista<--- reason why lol

yes defragged, cleaned up temp files, did virus scan. and went through task scheduler.
 
processor and memory is holding you back. buy the parts.

EDIT: now thati think aobut you should do both. get the new parts, and reformat.
 
Last edited:
linkin93 said:
processor and memory is holding you back. buy the parts.
Click to expand...

+1

Small Hard drive will slow you up when it gets close to full - b/c Windows stores a bunch of junk you're not aware of through normal everyday use. But getting 1-2GB or RAM from a PC that's runnign 256 or 512 MB of Ram is a major boost in performance for an old PC.

Won't touch a modern PC - but will help speed up an old Pentium 4 quit a bit.
 
ok well my dad is holding me back because his friend who is supposedly good with computers says its just the temp files and registry files that are slowing the harddrive :/ so lets get some mroe votes please :D must convince him...
 
no there shouldn't be... but if you could always go into your system settings and remove all the hardware that you’re going to installing... then add the new hardware and it would automatically refind the new hardware without creating a potential conflict.

but even if you didn't do that I don't think that it would cause a problem with upgrading CPU and RAM

It has caused a problem for be with upgrading a video card in the past if I didn't first remove the old one from system settings in windows
 
A computer is only as fast as the crap on the hard drive will let it be. You could upgrade the hardware and still not see much difference, most likely will but not what you should see. Like someone else said, get new hardware and format and reinstall windows.
 
Buy more ram and reformat. If it's still not performing as fast as you'd like then upgrade the processor. A 1.6ghz dual core should suffice, and definitely shouldn't be slow on Vista, considering my 1.6ghz single core wasn't bad at all.
 
Run a hard drive diagnostic tool, sometimes a failing hard drive can start to cause the entire system to get sluggish.
 
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