Age old question: Could I benifit from an upgrade?

[Turbopit]

First, I am planning to finally build a whole new machine later this year because we really need at least two machines in the house. I am in dire need of more storage space so I am hard drive shooping. I am wondering though if I would benefit by upgrading anything while I am at it. Possibly more and/or better ram? The main uses are Frontpage, Autocad, Photoshop 6.0, web surfing, and my wife uses programs like Word, Excel,and poerpoint a lot. I tend to get a lot of different things going at once. Another thing is I am trying to decide if I should host my personal web page or not. It gets little to no traffic most of the time, but when I make an update, it gets a few hundred hits in a night which is still pretty small. I have st up a mail server as well but I don't think I will do my own email. My connection is through road runner cable so it's pretty fast and of course full time. My current system was originally built 3 years ago, then a year or so later I replaced pretty much everything but the hard drive and a 64 stick of ram.

Here are the specs as I remember:

Supermicro SC750-a full tower case
BX6 version 2 motherboard
Intel Celeron 300a @ 504 MHz
4.x gb HD, don't remember manufacturer (cheap)
2 different sticks of 64MB cheap ram
Memorex 6x DVD with Cyberlink Power DVD
Sound Blaster Live Value sound card
Diamond Stealth II G460 agp graphics card
17" Relisys monitor
Logitech Mouseman three button mouse
Mustek flatbed scanner
Canon Powershot S20 digital camera
Win 98, originally 95

Most of this webpage http://www.floridahorsepower.com/mike's_projects.htm will get moved to http://www.four-banger.tzo.com but without the .tzo. included.

Any tips/comments are welcome

Thanks, I've been away from this site for well over a year so it's almost like I am a newbie to this stuff again. ;>)

 

[XeonTux]

You are the best person to determine whether you need more RAM or not. Do you go into the swap frequently? If yes, then you could benefit. Run some kind of system monitor program while doing normal work for a while to see.

As far as hosting web page, making your PC a server can open up security issues so be prepared. You might want an OS with better multitasking and security like Linux, or Win2k if you insist.

 

[AndyHui]

You would probably get the most benefit from buying a new hard drive. Present hard drives with their much higher areal densities and 7200 RPM would really make a difference to your system as compared to the old 4.3GB hard drive.

 

[Modeps]

everyone could benifit from an upgrade...

 

[Turbopit]

<< everyone could benifit from an upgrade... >>





That's for sure. I just don't want to upgrade something that I won't get any use out of. Like sound card. I haven't had any speakers hooked up for almost a year now.

I've had a few problems I want to avoid. I get &quot;scratch disk full&quot; errors everytime I use photoshop. Everything locks up sometimes when I get to many things open, but usually it happens when I haven't re-booted for a few weeks. Basically besides the storage issues, I would like faster performance when using photoshop and the programs that came with my Canon camera. I would like to get a larger monitor, better graphics card, etc... but I decided I'll just build a whole new machine for that.

Thanks

 

[Turbopit]

ttt