Upgrade help Pentium 4 CPU 3 GHz 2.99 GHz 512 MB RAM

bigmoma22

Hi guys

bit of advice for newbie
I have a Dell Desktop Pentium 4 CPU 3 GHz 2.99 GHz 512 MB RAM and surprise surprise it is very sslllooowwww....
I'd like to go cheap and cheerfull, simple upgrade, even browsers are slow. Not for gaming but running a few photo editing and layout programmes. Budget is under 100 yoyos. Currently running XP and reasonably happy with it. Will reinstall OS now but no high hopes...

Thanks in advance fr all replies.

Vicxas

Any chance you know the Mhz of your RAM?

Monotype

€100 won't really buy you anything worthwhile.

Even the cheapest €40 modern processors are several times as fast, but are incompatible. Older RAM is much more expensive that RAM for new computers too.

I think that you should save what you have until you accumulate €300-400 and you'd be able to build a very nice desktop machine.

I advise against putting any money into what you have at the moment. If you can salvage some RAM from another machine that someone is throwing away, then that would be fair enough but it's not worth much money and won't provide you with drastic improvements. You'd have to find what RAM is compatible as there are many editions of Pentium 4.
Start menu->Run-> Type in dxdiag
might show you the model of pentium 4 and the motherboard but for more detail, you should get CPU-Z from www.cpuid.com and note the motherboard model.

For now, you could use ccleaner to clean up your system and defragment your hard drives (Open My Computer, right-click on a drive -> Properties -> Tools -> Defragment Now).
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

A clean install would be better, as you were suggesting so you'd only take those steps if you weren't going to reinstall.

Bear in mind if you reinstall with a clean copy of XP, you'd need to slipstream in SATA drivers, if you have SATA hard drives. If it's a disc that came with a dell or something, you don't need to worry about this, although you should uninstall any necessary software.

Overheal

Either an i3 or an AMD FM1 Socket APU. Probably the latter, for cost.

At the price range you're looking at though - the 400s - it usually makes more sense to buy a preassembled unit than build one yourself. Custom builds don't really start making good sense until the 600-800 range, imho.

For 100 your best bet is to save up and just reinstall windows and keep the machine lean. I wouldn't even reccomend new ram. I've tried that fix before, and it just turned out to be the CPU was the bottleneck. At that age your computer is ready for retirement.

If you are stuck, and need the new computer, your only real other option is financing another one if that's what your budget looks like.

dyer

an extra 512mb/1gb will make a nice difference with that machine.. similar spec to one i had years back. 512 is the bare minimum really. call around to some local pc repair shops, they might have a few old sticks lying around and they might even throw you some for free.

Overheal

better to check adverts, but download and run speccy and find out what type of ram you have (eg. PC5300 etc)

Monotype

Overheal wrote: »

At the price range you're looking at though - the 400s - it usually makes more sense to buy a preassembled unit than build one yourself. Custom builds don't really start making good sense until the 600-800 range, imho.

Sometimes you can get good deals for low priced pre-assembleds but there's more choice in building yourself. For example, the prebuilts will never put an SSD in there. A modern cheap CPU with an SSD makes an excellent office PC. You often don't need vast storage and all your programs open nearly instantly. You could add a harddrive if you really needed to the extra space, although you'd have to hunt around for a good deal for those at the moment.

You have to be very careful with the RAM. The pentium 4 went on for a long time across several sockets and many revisions of those sockets. It could be rambus RAM which is very expensive. Again, only worth investing the minimal amount in this - €10 maybe, because you'd be throwing money away trying to get that into shape.

Serephucus

Assuming everything else is compatible* I'd recommend something like this:

Item|Price
Total build cost: €112.96 (inc delivery Free!)
Intel Celeron G530 2.4GHz LGA1155 2MB|€43.36
ASRock S1155 Intel H61M DDR3 mATX|€50.01
Kingston 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3 1333MHz DIMM 240-pin CL9|€19.59


This would obliterate the Pentium in terms of performance. It's about the equivalent of having a 4.5GHz Pentium dual core in your system.

* The main problem is that odds are, your hard drive(s) and optical drive are IDE, not SATA, and IDE was phased out a while back. You could get converters, but they're not ideal. Download and run Speccy to check if your hard drives are SATA or not. If they are, the above upgrade might be feasible.

Overheal

Its a surreal day when anyone suggests a Celeron obliterates something in terms of performance...

Nothingbetter2d

bigmoma22 wrote: »

Hi guys

bit of advice for newbie
I have a Dell Desktop Pentium 4 CPU 3 GHz 2.99 GHz 512 MB RAM and surprise surprise it is very sslllooowwww....
I'd like to go cheap and cheerfull, simple upgrade, even browsers are slow. Not for gaming but running a few photo editing and layout programmes. Budget is under 100 yoyos. Currently running XP and reasonably happy with it. Will reinstall OS now but no high hopes...

Thanks in advance fr all replies.

what model of dell pc have you got? or post the service tag number so we can look up the specs

some older Dell optiplex p4's will allow upto 2gb (2x 1gb stick) which u can buy from cruicial.com for about €40

that would speed up that old pc a fair bit