Upgrade Help

dacouch

Hi,

I have acquired a Dell Pc with nice monitor and keyboard etc, the only drawback is it has a Pentium 3 Processor and 512mb ram.

The tower itself is very nice, how easy and cheap is it to upgrade it an acceptable processor with a bit more memory. It does not need a mega fast processor as a friend who has never used a PC wants it so just needs a basic starting computer.

Cheers

Merry Christmas

dehaani

The first thing to do is upgrade the RAM.

Reinstalling the OS or a fresh install of a new OS also potentially improves things a lot.

Many big name machines will preinstall Norton products, if that's the case then remove it and use Avira instead; the impact to performance is much lower using Avira.

As for a processor upgrade, you will probably have to source a second-hand upgrade and I personally don't think it will be worth the effort or cost but if you give us more information about the actual machine then you may get a better recommendation about potential processor upgrades.

Upgrading the video card can also boost performance considerably but again, we need more info about the current specs to help with a recommendation.

bat999

It would be best if you found out more about the processor, motherboard and memory.
Use a program such as Belarc Advisor.
From here:-http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
:cool:

dacouch

I'll have a look at the processor etc when I get a chance to pop over there later and I'll post it up here.

I have a couple of Nvidea P117 graphics cards, would these be worth installing?

Cheers

Donnie

dacouch wrote: »

I'll have a look at the processor etc when I get a chance to pop over there later and I'll post it up here.

I have a couple of Nvidea P117 graphics cards, would these be worth installing?

Cheers

If there is no PCI Express slot, then you don't have much choice.

I'm sure it's better than the Integrated Graphics solution if that it what is installed. At least it will free up the system RAM. Just remember to install the latest compatible drivers from the Nvidia website.

GeForce4 MX440 64MB DDR 8x AGP DVI Video Card w/TV-Out