Upgrading a PC - advice

Yenwod

I have a computer that's a little over 6 years. It's served me well but over the past year or so, it's chugging along pretty slowly. I know very little about computer hardware and was wondering would there be any point in upgrading, would a computer that old be able to deal with newer memory/harddrives/windows 7 etc. The specs are:

Dimension 5150 Pentium 4 Processor 640 with HT technology (3.20GHz, 800MHz fsb, 2MB cache)
2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 400MHz Memory (4x512)
13-1 media card reader
320GB (2x160GB) 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive - Dual HDD Config - No Raid
Sonic Software for DVD/RW+R (No Media)
16x max. DVD+/-RW Drive
128MB ATI Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory graphics card
IEEE 1394 PCI Adapter card
Integrated Analogue TV tuner PCI card and Dell MCE remote control
Truemobile 1450 WLAN USB Adaptor

English - Win XP Media Centre 2005

Any advice appreciated!

Monotype

Scrap it.

You can save the card reader.

Maybe you can save the DVD drive and the hard drives if they are SATA.


Those old Pentium 4s are very slow and inefficient. They're not enough for today's demands. Even a €30 or €40 processor will beat it. Better to save for a new system. A budget of €300-400 would have a computer running like a dream in comparison to your old machine and you'd spend too much upgrading it just for little improvements.

Yenwod

Ah cheers Monotype, I figured it probably was a bit outdated alright. Thanks for the quick & concise answer :-)

Monotype

Come back to this forum if you're looking for a new build advice. You'll probably get a better deal than with Dell.