PC Upgrade, suggestions please

N

newbie_88

New Member
I have a 3 year old pc, it's seems to be slowing down on me for everyday tasks, I use it mostly for work/vpn and general office/photo stuff. Here's the specs, I'd like to spend 100-200 to improve on the performance... what do you recommend?

* ECS L7S7A2, S.462, 266/333FSB, Audio/LAN, DDR333/400, Retail Box
* AMD Athlon™ XP 2400+ 384K 266FSB OEM
* House Brand Socket A Cooling Fan w/Heatsink
* 128MB DDR333 PC2700 Non-ECC Infineon
* 1.44Mb 3.5 Samsung Beige Floppy Drive OEM
* 80Gb ATA133 Maxtor 7200rpm
* AGP Sapphire ATI RADEON 7500LE 128Mb SDR TV-Out OEM
* 52 X Samsung IDE Beige CD-Rom OEM
* Samsung Combo 48x24x48-16A IDE Beige CD-RW/DVD-Rom OEM
* Integrated 32AW SRS Audio Adapter
* Integrated 10 / 100 Mbps LAN Adapter
* ATX Beige MidTower 400W P.S. w/2 Front USB
* 400Watt Beige Multimedia Speakers Retail Box
* No Operating System (Choose)
 
The first thing here to take care is a Welcome to the Computer Forum! http://www.computerforum.com/70672-official-welcome-thread.html And a reminder to review the http://www.computerforum.com/52038-forum-rules.html

After three years of use "any" system will slow down for several reasons. But with a quick lookover at the build there you are well overdue for a new build. You only have 128mb of system memory? What operating system are you running if not a version of Windows? XP will easily take a bit as well as the system board by default for background services. Newer softwares will certainly need "more memory". That's a #1 item to see improvement as far as the hardware environment.

The software side would best be deal with by two freeware system cleaners. Over a lengthy period of time the system registry as well as the hard drive become cluttered with useless items no longer needed. Those plus any high degree of data fragmentation due to a lack of drive maintainence will have a direct effect at seeing the loss of overall system performance. Along with updating all drivers and software with newer versions a reformat of the drive and clean install of the current OS would see a drastic improvement with more memory added and of course a much newer AGP video card since there is no longer any updates available for the current discontinued model you have there.
 
You only have 128mb of system memory? What operating system are you running if not a version of Windows?

The software side would best be deal with by two freeware system cleaners. [/QUOTE]



I'm running xp, and i see i failed to include in my op that i did up my ram to 1gb. should i increase to 2gb, would that show significant inc in performance?

As for the two freeware cleaners - which are they? i feel i may have malware/spyware on my pc also...
 
newbie_88 said:
You only have 128mb of system memory? What operating system are you running if not a version of Windows?

(/QUOTE}The software side would best be deal with by two freeware system cleaners.
Click to expand...



I'm running xp, and i see i failed to include in my op that i did up my ram to 1gb. should i increase to 2gb, would that show significant inc in performance?

As for the two freeware cleaners - which are they? i feel i may have malware/spyware on my pc also...[/QUOTE]

uh yeah sometimes upgrading ram is actualy better than upgradeing your procesor, but seeing how you've done that already, maybe you should go and get a processor upgrade to balance it out. does that sound reasonable?
 
The Atholon XP3400+ was actually the highest model. But your board only goes upto the 333mhz fsb. The top model there would be the XP3000+. If you ran either of the 3200+ and 3400+ models they would still run at 333mhz(166mhz x 2) there. At this late date you would probably have to go to Amazon or EBay to catch an OEM deal on a Socket A cpu.

The freewares referred to earlier are intended for cleanup and not adwares, spywares, malwares, viruses and the like. RegCleaner is found at http://www.majorgeeks.com/RegCleaner_d460.html

The other one being mentioned here has the rather distinctive nick name known as the "crap cleaner" is the CCleaner found at http://www.ccleaner.com/ These two both have the ability to clean up the "orphanned" registry values in the system registry that commonly result in system slowdowns over a period of time. Quite often uninstallers for various programs simply leave a deposit of "crap" useless entries. The CCleaner also locates and removes useless temp folders left by installers on the hard drive that can take up quite a bit of drive space.

For system protection and removing any "uninvited guests" or just simply "oests" there are a larger number of freeware as well as retail programs like AVG 7.5 Grisoft's free edition of their antivirus software found at http://free.grisoft.com/doc/5390/lng/us/tpl/v5#avg-anti-spyware-free You can also find their try out version of the AVG Anti-Spyware Remover that loses some features after the trial period runs out. This one replaces the original adware/spyware remover known as Ewido since Grisoft biought that out.

Besides Grisoft's programs there the latest freeware to get reviewed here is called Spyware Terminator available at http://www.spywareterminator.com/ Besides being a competitor to Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal in removing the typical adbots and popup ad zingers as well as data miners and tracking cookies it offers a mild firewall where new startups can be allowed or denied when detected. Ad-Aware is free at http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE...045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5 Meanwhile I'm currently waiting to test their 2007 beta version just announced at http://www.lavasoft.com/
 
I have some spare parts that I could sell you if you're interested. The parts are: asus A7N8X-X mobo, athlon xp-mobile 2400+ (barton core, 512kb of L2 cache), 6600gt, and Thermaltake Extreme Volcano 12 80mm.
 
Thanks PC eye for the reply, very informative! I'll try out the cleaner/spyware tools and see how things go from there...

We'll see how things look after the above, towly, i'd rather not get into replacing the mobo as well - i'm also in the process of building a new machine (my first) and would prefer not to spend too much on this dinosaur.
 
For a little more you could see a jump into a full sized Asus Socket AM2 model board like the one seen at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131068

For a dual core AMD model to go with that doesn't break the bank the AM2 3800+ X2 is seen for $109.99 at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103735

The replacement model for the MSI Radeon X1300 Pro used here has just been found. The MSI Radeon X1950 Pro is seen at a much better price then usual at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127271 The MSI brand has seen great results on the few builds here.
 
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