Help Required: Upgrade and reinstall advice

[Roosti3]

Hi all, I have been away from the PC meddling fold for a few years due to work commitments and as such came to the view point that "if it aint broke dont try and fix it".........

Well anyway its broke now so I am back !!! Built these two back in 2006

PC running XP - Medium use and low spec gaming ie CnC (Xbox available for higher spec gaming)
Asus A8n-SLI Premium (socket 939, 4xDIMM DDR 4GB max)
Radeon X800 GTO (256MB DDR3)
Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+
Scythe SCNJ-1000 Ninja heatsink
1GB Ram corsair xms (2x512)
P180 with Seasonic ss-600HT (S12)
Netgear wg311t wireless adaptor
80 GB sata windows/program drive
200GB sata page file and data HD



Media Centre running XP MCE edition - TV recording and DVD playing
Asus M2NPV-VM (onboard Geforce 6150) (socket AM2, DDR2 8GB max)
AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+
2014 Ram (4 x 512 corsair)
Hauppage Nova-DT Dual DVB-T
Antec NSK2480 with a seasonic aswell I think
Samsung 80 GB sata program drive
Maxtor diamond max9 250gb sata data drive



Both are at the point where they need a OS reinstall at least. I have lost touch with the latest developments and specs so just want some input to see if you guys can recommend any worthwhile upgrades while I am in upgrade mode. MCE machine has been blue screening recently and stalling when media centre is opened. Not sure what the issue is but reinstall definitely needed and a bigger data drive.



wrt MCE machine, do I want to get a faster processor while AM2 is still available and or ram? Saw a AM2 X2 6000+ for £52 which is not bad and looks a decent enough upgrade.


wrt PC, the 939 socket seems to be an issue with all CPUs getting rare and pretty expensive. Original intention for build spec in 2006 was to overclock. Is this the only way to go now with my X2 3800+? If so how much and what spec ram should I be looking to get?


Have avoided Vista thus far and am still quite happy running XP and XP MCE. Am I out of date yet ???


Cheers for any advice

 

[Slugbait]

MCE machine has been blue screening recently and stalling when media centre is opened. Not sure what the issue is but reinstall definitely needed and a bigger data drive.

I had the same problems back in August. Dropped an image, thinking that was what I needed to do.

Nope, kept getting freezes and BSOD. I needed to remove the fan and vacuum out the heatsink. Then I taped used dryer sheets to the air intakes to reduce future dust build-up.

wrt MCE machine, do I want to get a faster processor...

Even if you game on it, probably not. If you don't game on it, your system is overkill. I have no problems whatsoever with 2K5 on a Northwood 3GHz and 512 megs of RAM.

Am I out of date yet ???

If you're going digital cable and HD, then yeah, you're getting there. You'll need Win7 for the new cablecard adapters (still not widely available yet). But if you're just running coax from the cable box and an IR Blaster, you're OK for now.

 

[Roosti3]

Ok will look into the cleaning and temperature issues to see if that helps. I did read somewhere that a north or south bridge heatsink can help with my motherboard so will look into that.

Good to know that my MCE hardware spec isnt out of date yet. (No gaming only TV, video and surfing)