replace computer or wipe clean?

victor2

NiftyDigits wrote: »

I would recommend the upgrade and a clean install.

My PC is similarly old and I have made similar upgrades. They are very simple. You can easily fit both yourself in under thirty minutes. Tower PCs are modular in design. You just slot the parts in and then secure them was a couple of screws to the outside casing.

Unless you have some kind of disability, it is almost impossible that you will not be able to do it yourself.

£30 will make all the difference.

It's not a matter of disability or otherwise, but some (many?) people just don't have the courage or understanding to mess with the insides of a computer - especially one that probably has 8 years worth of dirt built up inside!
A clean install would definitely be a challenge for a self-admitted non techie...

Sound advice though, as usual.

NiftyDigits

victor2 wrote: »

It's not a matter of disability or otherwise, but some (many?) people just don't have the courage or understanding to mess with the insides of a computer - especially one that probably has 8 years worth of dirt built up inside!
A clean install would definitely be a challenge for a self-admitted non techie...

Sound advice though, as usual.

That is just defeatist talk and has no place on this forum.
The fact is that it is just a matter of getting started. Personally I think that it is not much more difficult than putting new batteries in a remote control.
There are many non-Techies people here who have upgraded their machines with just a little guidance.

People who say they can't without even trying, are just a waste of time.

randm

i have undone the cover and given it a good hoover!!! and i do use ccleaner, one of the problems is that the person who loaded on the windows xp for us also loaded on xp media professional ( think thats what it is) so every time i turn on i get a corrupt disk message/ disk needs to be checked for consistency, i need a dummies guide to sorting out your pc abd getting it back to new!

NiftyDigits

randm wrote: »

i have undone the cover and given it a good hoover!!! and i do use ccleaner, one of the problems is that the person who loaded on the windows xp for us also loaded on xp media professional ( think thats what it is) so every time i turn on i get a corrupt disk message/ disk needs to be checked for consistency, i need a dummies guide to sorting out your pc abd getting it back to new!

We'll look into it when I get off the phone.

Quiet_Spark

Go with what Nifty says, he knows his onions where PC's are concerned.

We have an old Dell OptiPlex 745 in a small form factor case that was slower than a 3 legged asthmatic dog by todays standards.
It originally consisted of a 1.8GHz Pentium D CPU, 1GB RAM, 120GB S-ATA HDD, Onboard graphics, Onboard sound, Onboard Gigabit LAN, Win XP and was quite frankly ready for the bin compared to what's out there today.

I paid a grand total of £70 to upgrade it which consisted of another 1GB of RAM, an NVidia GS8400 video card, and an ASUS Xonar DS 7.1 soundcard.
I was also recently given a 120GB SSD, so that is in there as well.

It now runs Win 7 Ultimate and acts as a full on media centre that quite happily plays full HD movies either over the network or via it's integral DVD drive in full surround sound without missing a beat, and thanks to the SSD it's boot time from power on to a fully loaded desktop is 17 seconds.
I don't know it's exact age, but the OptiPlex 745 was around in 2002 so it's at least 12 years old.

Nifty didn't advise me on that upgrade path, I did it myself but that shows you just how easy it is to breathe new life in to old hardware




PS
Microsoft didn't do a "Professional Media" version of XP, the choices were either Home, Pro, or MCE (Media Centre Edition).

spongebobbrownpants

I'm still running a dell 5100 and works perfectly well for the odd internet use and music playback, fan runs high a bit but just turn the volume up

I'm running windows 7, only upgrade is some extra memory (3gb at present) so a clean XP install will be fine. Try site 'crucial dot com', (sorry can't post links!), they have a memory scanner you can run which will then tell you the correct memory available for upgrading. Spare memory will be cheap as chips for a PC that old. Plenty of youtube guides on how to change memory, nothing to it really in a tower PC.

NiftyDigits

Order the RAM in post #6.

randm

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Order the RAM in post #6.

have just ordered!

randm

Quiet_Spark wrote: »

Go with what Nifty says, he knows his onions where PC's are concerned.

We have an old Dell OptiPlex 745 in a small form factor case that was slower than a 3 legged asthmatic dog by todays standards.
It originally consisted of a 1.8GHz Pentium D CPU, 1GB RAM, 120GB S-ATA HDD, Onboard graphics, Onboard sound, Onboard Gigabit LAN, Win XP and was quite frankly ready for the bin compared to what's out there today.

I paid a grand total of £70 to upgrade it which consisted of another 1GB of RAM, an NVidia GS8400 video card, and an ASUS Xonar DS 7.1 soundcard.
I was also recently given a 120GB SSD, so that is in there as wel








It now runs Win 7 Ultimate and acts as a full on media centre that quite happily plays full HD movies either over the network or via it's integral DVD drive in full surround sound without missing a beat, and thanks to the SSD it's boot time from power on to a fully loaded desktop is 17 seconds.
I don't know it's exact age, but the OptiPlex 745 was around in 2002 so it's at least 12 years old.

Nifty didn't advise me on that upgrade path, I did it myself but that shows you just how easy it is to breathe new life in to old hardware




PS
Microsoft didn't do a "Professional Media" version of XP, the choices were either Home, Pro, or MCE (Media Centre Edition).

i just restarted the pc to check, i have a choice of either windows xp media centre edition, or microsoft windows xp professional, i click on the first one.

googler

You don't need to wipe the existing hard disk clean, and you don't have to stick with the existing hard disk as your primary disk.

The Dell will have primary and secondary slots for at least two hard disks. You can buy a new one of the same size or larger than the current one, put the new one in the primary slot, and move the current one to the secondary. You could get a Solid State Drive for the new primary, that would speed you up. If you have install disk for XP, you can install that on your new primary, or you could experiment with the free OSs like Linux or Ubuntu.

There are LOADs of how-to guides on YouTube and on the web generally telling you in plain simple terms how to do all this. You just need to google for them.