RAM is it worth it

kwikbreaks

I see you've already decided on a new PC. Good move because although DDR2 ram is dirt cheap a machine that old won't use DDR2 and the older standards tend to be more expensive.

If it were mine and I was going to keep it I'd give it a fresh lease of life by installing Ubuntu Linux which doesn't use about 80% of the machine power just to run the opsys.

A new case can be had for about £20 so although you could almost certainly swap out the mainboard for a modern one the saving is very small and the old machine is probably worth more than you'll pay for a case. Nothing else in it is likely to be worth reusing unless you fancy keeping a floppy drive for old time's sake.

posted_2

I keep reading threads that XP "nowadays" needs lots more ram because of service packs etc, it's not true, XP fully patched runs easily with 512MB, buying a new pc is a complete waste of money. Reinstall windows, and it will run sweet as a nut, without spending a penny. Unless you are a gamer, 5 years isn't old. Browsing and writing letters is bread and butter stuff to a 10 year old pc.

GunJack

I'm with posted on this one....5-y-o pc shouldn't be written off if all you use it for is surfing and a bit of Office work...jeez, my desktop is 4-y-o, and still sweet runner. Ok, I've got 2GB RAM (only DDR, I may add) which helps a bit.

However, I recently did a clean install on a completely wiped HDD on my old desktop (8-y-o, Athlon XP1900+, XP Home, 512Mb SD RAM, DVD burner, CD-ROM ad a floppy ) and that isn't too far behind this one now

So don't be rushing to spend loads on a new pc when a couple of quid on RAM and a bit of tlc will sort it out

spud17

If anyone else wants to chuck a perfectly usable 5yo PC, please PM me.

With GunJack etc on this, mine started out in 1999, 768mb of sdram and now upped to an athlon xp2400 (£10 on ebay).
Works absolutely fine for browsing and emails, usually playing music at the same time.

The secret is not to load it with carp, especially things like unnecessary phone software, which insists on continually checking home for updates.

Sput2001

Read post 8 again - the PC isn't five years old, it's older.

Either way, I've got a seven year old second PC running XP Pro with 1Gb of RAM and an AMD 1600 processor, and it's fine...