Windows XP

brummybloke

rizla01 wrote:

Hi,

Same problem for me.

I have windows ME on my system and have been suffering many problems. It's O.K. to start with after a re-format but gets worse and worse, slower and slower and the registry keeps needing to get cleaned and repaired. sys restore packs up. Broadband seems like dial up and emails take an age to read, so much so that I have wished many a time that I was back with AOL. :eek:

I have AVG running permanently along with spyware guard and Zone Alarm.

I am running an 850 AMD athlon with 380 meg Ram with a 19" CTX CRT monitor, Nvidia G force display card and 40 gig hard drive which I partitioned into 8-9 gig segments. It is not used for games.

1) Am I suitable for XP?

2) Should I do a complete reformat of ALL of the partitions or am I best getting another, larger HD?

3) I am considering getting a DVD writer. Is this good enough?

4) Any suggestions on how to acheive the best for as little as poss?

5) On the DVD side of things, I am hoping one day, to D/L some films. How easy is it to make DVDs that will play on any DVD player and what is the approximate cost of doing so, per film.

if you are looking at using files of 4 gig or more then i would suggest that you upgrade your pc instead of just getting a dvd writer, forgetting that downloading films ( unless public domain films) is not legal and just dealing with the actual size of the files you will be dealing with i would suggest you get one of those dell deals. you should be looking at ( nowdays, and i am by no means a leet person on the latest hardware), a minimum of a 2 gighz processor ( the higher the better), 512 meg of ram, an 80 gig hard drive ( you can get 200 gig ones for £50) windows xp. that obviously doesnt include a decent graphics card but as you say you dont play games on it you can get a fx5200..128 meg for 20 quid. plus you would need a new mother board as your processor is 5 years old. also remember that you will have the files which will = 4.3 gig and you will have an image which will also be 4.3 gig, this means you would have to extract image to different sector on hd which will slow things down.

you can get away with getting a dvdwriter but it will take that long to extract a 4 gig file for burning and for other processes that if you were thinking of upgrading before, it may be worth a harder look now.