New desktop or not?

macman

How much free disk space do you have? That could be the problem, as the rest of the specs are fine for a 10 year old PC.
Before you ditch it, why not do a clean install or a Factory Restore (if you have a an OS disk)? That will probably do wonders for it's speed-and if it doesn't, it's cost you nothing.
Those specs should be quite adequate for a machine used for office tasks, email, surfing etc.

muzer

Hey all. To try and answer some of the queries :

My hard drive has 80 gig of free space on it (I have most of my personal bits and pieces on an external hard drive).

If I stuck an extra gig of ram in would it make any difference? Is the fact that the motherboard and processor are so old likely to negate any effect of the extra ram? I've checked on crucial and the maximum ram I can fit into my machine would be 2gb (this would cost £73 to boost from 1gb to 2gb) - would that be worth considering?

How do I check the graphics card and are they easy to fit a new one? How do I find out which graphics are card would be compatible?

Thanks for your help on this.

bat999

muzer wrote: »

If I stuck an extra gig of ram in would it make any difference?

In my opinion, not much difference.
1GB of RAM is usually sufficient for normal use.
But it's up to you.:cool:

closed

see post 6, if it wasn't slow when you bought it, it doesn't need to be slow now

if your external hard drives fails, have you got your bits and pieces saved elsewhere.

bat999

closed wrote: »

see post 6, if it wasn't slow when you bought it, it doesn't need to be slow now

Amen to that.

macman

Pointless to spend £73 on more RAM as the machine is worth less than that. The improvement will not be that great on a P4.

spakkker

£73 on ram??? They must want you to buy 2 new 1GB sticks and throw out existing ..2 x 512mb????

This prog,cpuz will id your m/board and ram type http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/1.56-setup-en.exe

You can get 1gb pc133 sdram ~£15 ebay

muzer

I've only got two slots for ram so if I want to upgrade from 1gb to 2gb how else do I do it other than buying 2 x 1gb and throwing out the 2 512mb?

closed

Don't waste money on upgrading ram, use what you have more effectively, the change from 1 to 2GB will probably make no noticeable difference, if it's slow, look at what is running.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2436849

rodenal

Agree with all of the above in that if you do a fresh windows install that machine should be absolutely fine for everyday use. Alot of the cheaper cpu's coming out just now dont run at a clock speed much higher than yours and you will find the extra cores aren't used too often with the more mundane everyday tasks.

The only thing I would say is that although football manager isn't a graphics intensive game (nearly any cheap standalone video card will be sufficient) it does need a decent cpu (the minimum spec isn't really sufficient) and more importantly a good whack of ram to run properly (i.e with a large database and a few leagues). You would be absolutely fine with one of the older football manager games though, and these normally have updates for the latest season etc.