Worth putting extra memory in these PCs?

krishna

The charity I work for has two old PCs which are running very slowly.
They are connected to a server based network. The server and two other PCs are much newer and working fine. All PCs are running MS Office (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint), Thunderbird, Firefox. Two two old ones are running Win2k +SP4.
I've checked the specs of the old ones via system information and this is what it says:

1. Dell Dimension 4300.
With PC running Thunderbird and Excel:
x86 Family 15 Model 1 Stepping 2 GenuineIntel 1594MHz
Total Physical memory 261136
Available physical memory 5328
Total virtual memory 892484
Available virtual memory 333308
Hard drive 20GB with 4GB free space

Second PC just running Thunderbird:
Dell Dimension 4300
x86 Family 15 Model 1 Stepping 2 GenuineIntel 1594MHz
Total Physical memory 261136
Available physical memory 36604
Total virtual memory 892896
Available virtual memory 425636
Hard drive 20GB with 140MB free space

Question is, are they likely to improve significantly with extra RAM? The one with the nearly full hard drive runs extremely slowly. Would it run better if that was cleaned out? Generally speaking all documents, etc are now stored on the server, so really this only needs to store software + emails.

Money is tight at present, so if we can get them working reasonably well without replacing them that would be great, but I don't want to throw good money after bad.

Thanks

OneADay

Waste of money, go and get a replacement used dell desktop with higher spec from ebay (for example like This one)
Or maybe ask your local area people to donate to the particular charity.

macman

Would cost you about £25 each to add another 256K of RAM, probably not worth it when you can buy a Pentium IV base unit for about £50.
On the 2nd PC, it's not surprising that it's running slowly, because you have less than 1% free disk space on it! You need about 15% free space ideally, so shift some files off it, defrag both and run CCleaner. That should give you some improvement for zero outlay.

JasX

OneADay wrote: »

Waste of money

I agree, they're about ready for the scrap heap.

If you are able to do this yourself and have all the disks wiping the machines and freshly installing the OS and just the programs you actually need would be the best shot at getting them running at a useable speed.

Don't spend any money getting that done, it might not work in which case you may be binning the PC.

you might well find mileage in the donation route....

EDIT: I've sent you a PM (I think -sent box seems dodgy on this site, let me know if one doesn't arrive)

exup

just wondering if you format whether a clean installation of Linux such as Ubunut(using open office and thunderbird) may help them run smoother perhaps. UNless that is you need windows or don't want to go down the linux route

turbobob

Just looked at some info that says that model takes PC133 SDRAM. You can get this on Ebay cheaply (from about £1 + P&P for 256mb, which would double the memory currently installed). It would not be justifiable spending money on new memory as it is expensive - much more expensive than current technologies.

Yes the systems are very dated. I'd guesstimate about 9 years old based on the spec. A cleanout of junk (try CC Cleaner) and a cheap memory upgrade may drag a bit more life out of them. But they are at the end of their useful lives for running current software.

krishna

I run CCleaner and Malwarebytes on them from time to time, but will try and get HD usage down with a more thorough cleanout and defrag, etc. Seems like people like to keep every single email and attachment they ever receive, "just in case". Mail files seem to have reached about 5GB! So I'll get the users to clean those out a bit too.

The organisation is not ready to go down Linux route.

macman

krishna wrote: »

I run CCleaner and Malwarebytes on them from time to time, but will try and get HD usage down with a more thorough cleanout and defrag, etc. Seems like people like to keep every single email and attachment they ever receive, "just in case". Mail files seem to have reached about 5GB! So I'll get the users to clean those out a bit too.

The organisation is not ready to go down Linux route.

You can't defrag if the drive is 99% full. Move the data off first, then clean up.

krishna

macman wrote: »

You can't defrag if the drive is 99% full. Move the data off first, then clean up.

Yup, that's what I'm doing. Starting with unnecessary software.

tomsolomon

If your a registered charity, why don't you ask your local council for a couple of their old machines, they would be more than happy to hand over a couple of their obsolete stock and if your realy lucky they might even donate a couple of new machines.

The CPU's on those machines are more than capable of running the applications you are using, but the lack of memory and HDD space will slow them considerably. Clean up the HDD's for the time being, and make sure they are free of malware for a temporary (cheap) solution...

I would most definately look into Linux if your planning on keeping the machines for any amount of time.
It's as easy to use as Windows, and Open Office is most definately a viable solution to your office needs, and very similar to M$ Office.....

And yes they will run faster with more memory.
I'm sure if you ask nicely there may be someone on here with a couple of old sticks of memory hanging around they can post to you....

daedana

Using Linux seems to be a good choice in this case. If you're about ready to remove everything, clean install of linux seems like a good idea.

I'm not sure, so please comment on this everyone. But Ubuntu is quite heavy and meant for new machines. You might just want to use some other distro. Xubuntu is a nice option, it uses lighter xfce instead of Ubuntus heavy gnome. Anyway I hope this gives you some tips.

http://www.xubuntu.org/get

You can find something on this from here. Those machines are just great as long as the CPU runs.