Upgrade Quick Help required....

philmcn

Hi Everyone - I'm not an expert, but I built my own machine a couple of years ago. Its getting really slow now and I'd like your advice on how to make it faster. I don't play any games on it, so I don't need a fancy graphics card. I do have a lot of business applications and databases, and it is getting slower and slower. I have no viruses or spyware on it.

Shuttle SS59G V2 Mini Aluminium Barebone system for P4 Socket 775
1x Intel Pentium® 4 531 3.0GHz 800FSB LGA 775 CPU EM64T with 1MB cache
2 x Elixir 512MB DDR400 PC3200 RAM (elixir brand)

What can I upgrade to that will make it faster?
Does it make sense to buy a new chip?Will it fit in my old system?
How about memory?
Also, where's the best place in Ireland to get this stuff?

Thanks for all your help.

Khannie

You don't mention your hard drive. Details on that if you please. It's a huge bottleneck generally.

The ram is the first thing I'd upgrade out of those things. I still consider a P4 3.0GHz to be quite fast myself.

What operating system are you running on that box?

edit: lol. I'm not trying to sell you my hard drive. It's unlikely you have the right pci-express port for it.

philmcn

Sorry Khannie, didnt get this message until today.

I dont know what type of hard drive I have. Could you recommend a good one? Also, how do I swap all the data over from my old hard drive?

im running xp pro.


Anywhere good I can get new stuff delivered?

Conar

Hey Phil

I find that XP starts to grind to a halt after a while.
I used to reinstall mine at least once a year.
Mightn't be a bad idea to back up your stuff and reinstall and see if that speeds it up any.
Also if you are running a lot of apps it might benefit it to add more memory.
Check your memory usage in task manager.
If you are using all of it and the computer has to page all the time that will slow things down a lot.

If you are both short on memory and the hard drive is fragmented then its a double whammy and your PC would crawl because of it.

EDIT
Just to add, because your PC is quite old I would advise buying 2nd hand parts if you do upgrade any bits.
No point throwing a load of new bits at it when you may not be able to carry them over to your next PC.

Slutmonkey57b

philmcn wrote: »

Hi Everyone - I'm not an expert, but I built my own machine a couple of years ago. Its getting really slow now and I'd like your advice on how to make it faster. I don't play any games on it, so I don't need a fancy graphics card. I do have a lot of business applications and databases, and it is getting slower and slower. I have no viruses or spyware on it.

Not being funny, but try running O&O Defrag or PerfectDisk (not the standard WinXP degfrag) over it. You WILL find it makes a difference, esp if you do a boot- time defrag and redo your pagefile. In the days of NTFS a lot of techies went on about defragging being a con on desktop machines - that's not my experience in a PC that's been up and running a few years though.

Also have a trawl through Add/Remove Programs and have a think about what you really don't need anymore - at the very least you'll probably find Java has installed itself about 5 or six times (it doesn't like to delete itself sometimes after an upgrade).

kleefarr

Try this...

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/default.htm

and this..

www.ccleaner.com