I'm currently fixing someone's really old computer and am on the border line between upgrading the hard drive or upgrading the processor. I've upgraded the RAM to 1 GB and it originally only had 256 MB. All the rest of the specs are at the address listed below.
As far as the hard drive upgrade goes I would have to buy a PCI SATA card as the motherboard only has IDE. The one I was considering buying is this one
I don't think I'm going to spend the money on a solid state drive but I do have a 1 TB 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda drive laying around that I'm sure is significantly faster than the 60 GB 5400 rpm drive that came with the system.
For the processor upgrade I was going to upgrade the Celeron 2.2 GHz to a Pentium 4 2.5 GHz. The socket type is 478 for both of these processors. The Pentium 4 processor can be found at http://www.ebay.com/itm/161062037801?ss....l2649#viTabs_0
Any advice on what to do would be extremely helpful. Thanks in advance for your help.
go with the cpu upgrade. if possible max out the ram to 2gig as loosing part of system ram to onboard video or get a pci 128 meg videocard. what is the computer being used for as 1tb might be way overkill for hd storage?
Nup! cpu ain't the problem replacing it won't make a scrap of difference you'll still need a faster hdd,you've done the ram it would've made a bit of difference but not quite the kick in the pants as one would like,the hdd is next once done you won't need a cpu the difference is noticeable straight away,yep i've done it & to a 1.5 celeron & around the same age of the comp you have there,if you have a sata to ide adapter for the 1 tb hdd try that,easeus todo backup can clone it,you may have to put the 1 tb in an external to clone as it may not work as a slave inside the comp with the adapter on while there's a master ide inside as well,even when the 1tb is put in by itself as a clone it may not boot
as for ddp's suggestion of 2gb ram, if the comp is doing nothing more than surfing & normal use ,the memory in use at any one time won't go above 5-600mb my two older hp's also have the max 1gb ram thing,my suggestion is hdd first then watch taskmanager as you put it thru its paces,unless it's going to be used to watch movies perhaps rip & record,the extra ram will do nothing,my extra 1gb didn't
Alright so as I've come to understand upgrading the processor may make a substantial difference along with upgrading the hard drive. As for upgrading the hard drive would the hard drive perform better if connected with a PCI SATA card or the SATA to IDE adapter? Once again thanks for the input. I really appreciate it.
Hi, there. I have upgraded an old 2003 Dell, with the exact processor and ram capabilities. The maximum processor for your 478 socket is the P4 HT 3.02ghz processor that you could find through amazon.com. As for the ram, you already (most likely) maxed that out, and depending on your bios version, a simple sata/ide adapter for that 1tb barracuda drive should work just fine as an internal drive straight up, but no guarantees on that one. Other than that good luck...
Okay, maybe you could recommend a few things for me.
Upgrading my AMD A6-3620 APU 2.2ghz w/HD Radeon 6530d running in dual-graphics mode with a Radeon HD 6450 DDR3 2gb card on an ACER m3470g Windows 8 pro 64bit tower, to a AMD A8-3850 APU 2.9ghz with AMD Radeon 6550 HD Graphics processor. Would love to pair it with a better descrete graphics card, but which one? Any recomendations?
From my perspective I haven't really done much with AMD CPUs, let alone running them in dual graphics mode. Most of the time I deal with Nvidia and Intel. In my current rig I have an intel core i7 860 with a Radeon HD 5850 1 GB card. I've had this graphics card since 2009 and it's still running pretty well. It is a reference card. I took it apart and replaced the thermal paste in it a few months ago so it should be good to go for a few more years.
