Best upgrade choices for around $200?

[Jay59express]

My gf's mom wants me to upgrade her computer, and doesn't want to spend a lot of money doing it. It is an old 200 with 16MB of ram and a 2 gig hard drive. I was thinking like 750 mhz duron, cheap mobo, 128mb crucial, and a 10 gig hard drive. Can this be done for this price? Or..I could also just upgrade the RAM, and hard drive and then have money to put in a cheap 3d accelerator. I guess my question is...would a pentium 200 run a lot faster with the added ram, bigger hard drive and a fresh install of win98? It does a LOT of swapping with the hard drive..it cant even run snood, hehe. Thanks for any help guys!

 

[HaroldW]

Here is what I found in a few minutes:

Motherboard: Epox 8KTA2 $81 Mwave.com
CPU Duron 750 w/heatsink/fan $41 Mwave combo deal w/above motherboard
Crucial 128Meg PC133 Ram $21.59 from Crucial.com
Western Digital WD300AB 30Gig 5400RPM ATA100 hard drive $74 Newegg.com

Total with 30Gig hard drive (not including postage) = $217.59

It's getting hard to find a 10Gig drive, I looked four places and couldn't find one. The above Western Digital drive was about the best deal in the $60-$80 price range.

The KTA2 motherboard does get good reviews: http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd.html/aid=654/pg=1
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/epox_8kta2/index.shtml

 

[Salvador]

You're going to have to upgrade your PS if you go with a AMD chip.

Sal

 

[Quickfingerz]

Hmmm... Depends on what she uses it for... for internet browsing a fast hard drive does wonders.

speed for typical comptuer use goes like this:
#1 you must have an adequate amount of ram
#2 you must have a fast hard drive (the fastest available)
#3 you must have a fast processor


-- Just make sure you get a 7200 rpm hard drive. For browsing the internet, checking email, running Office 2000. The amount of time the OS boots and apps is more dependent on hard drive speed than anything else. A P2 350 with a fast hard drive will feel no slower than a 1.4 ghz t-bird given that the P2 is using the fastest available hard drive.