Need Advice Do I Buy New PC or Reformat & fine tune old one

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Peachesbackwards

Member
I would appreciate anyones advice on this. I have an HP m260N Media Center desktop computer, Pentium 4, 2.6 MHZ (2.5GB RAM), XP Sp 2, 120 GB hard drive. The computer itself runs fine, it rarely ever freezes & the only problem I have with it is that it takes a bit long to boot up (time the applications can actually run) & sometimes takes a few seconds for the applications to open up, but the time is still acceptable to me though I wish it was faster but I can live with it. This computer is very good to multitask with, i.e. I can burn a CD, download torrent files, surf the internet & word process at the same time. I don't do gaming or graphics work.

Anyway, I just got a new Toshiba Laptop with dual 2 core & it is very fast. A computer store in my area said, its probably my Operating System on my desktop that needs reformating & as a test he had me go into safe mode & see if boot up time & application time were faster. They were. So he basically told me then its my operating system that is getting my computer to not run as fast as shown by running it in the safe mode. Note, I don't have any spyware/adware/viruses on the computer as I regularly run various programs to detect & eliminate this stuff. Too make a long story short, the computer guy said that for $160 he'll pick up, reformat/repartion my system & fine tune everything. Am I better off doing this, then spending $750 on a new dual center 2 core media computer as he said the difference in speed that I would notice for what I use the computer for, wouldn't be noticeable. What do you think & advise?
 
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$160 is a lot of money for a simple format/reinstall. Your system should be quite adequate for your purposes. I'd ask around at other PC stores, you can probably find people who'll do it for a lot less. If you feel comfortable doing it, a format/reinstall is relatively easy, and you'll find numerous guides on the Internet that can help you through it. Provided you've backed up all your data, even if you weren't successful, you could just take it to a store and have them do it - there's nothing you could damage.
 
I think you should hold on to your cash and either do it yourself or get a friend to do it. $160, that is daylight robbery man. I think you should hold off abit and then get a quad core system or something.
 
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