I need a faster computer but I am not sure what to buy.

[Kaieye]

I have built or repaired more than 200 computers but I want to rebuild my main work computer. I am running Windows 2000 with a dos program running in the background(. I also burn DVD's, running torrent software and surfing the net. I am running a socket 754 Athlon 3000+ and a motherboard with a sis chipset and 512 megs of ddr. The PC crawls to a slowdown which is unacceptable. The DVD (burning at 8X takes almost 20-23 minutes) which is quite slow. I have two PATA drives which are 7200 rpm drives but I am not sure what is the bottleneck. When I try to open another window, the pc literally stalls...

I am thinking of going to AMD duo-core AM2 3800+, with one gig of ram and possibly raptor drives.

Anything else you can suggest? Raid?

 

[InflatableBuddha]

The obvious answer is that you're low on RAM, and your single-core Athlon is choking once you have multiple processes running.

Not sure what your budget is, and whether you overclock or not, but Intel is the way to go at this point in time. Get either a Pentium Dual Core (eg. E2160 or 2180) and overclock, or get a Core 2 Duo, in either the 4xxx or 6xxx series. The AMD Athlon X2s are really only recommended if you're on a very tight budget.

Ram is cheap, so go with 2GB of DDR2, and get a SATA hard drive with 16MB cache (these are still 7200 rpm, but they're much faster than PATA drives, largely because of the extra cache memory).

I have no experience with the Raptors, so I don't know how much faster they are.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Kaieye
I have built or repaired more than 200 computers but I want to rebuild my main work computer. I am running Windows 2000 with a dos program running in the background(. I also burn DVD's, running torrent software and surfing the net. I am running a socket 754 Athlon 3000+ and a motherboard with a sis chipset and 512 megs of ddr. The PC crawls to a slowdown which is unacceptable. The DVD (burning at 8X takes almost 20-23 minutes) which is quite slow. I have two PATA drives which are 7200 rpm drives but I am not sure what is the bottleneck. When I try to open another window, the pc literally stalls...

I am thinking of going to AMD duo-core AM2 3800+, with one gig of ram and possibly raptor drives.

Anything else you can suggest? Raid?

Honestly, aside from simply buying RAM for your current PC, you're probably fine just as you are, unless there's another problem or upgrade you want. I'd go to 1.0 or 1.5GB and call it a day. Win2k doesn't need that much, and if you were to remove bittorrent from the equation, 1.0GB would easily be enough.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

No need to upgrade the CPU with those tasks. Not sure if that board will allow you to overclock that CPU north of 2.4GHz. Bump RAM to 1GB. I burn at 4x for the lowest PIE/PIF. Definitely unload torrent.

Best option is to zero fill the HDDs and clean install W2K.

 

[TemjinGold]

Go to 2 gigs of ram. If you went with a new cpu, you might as well get a new of everything as you'd need different ram, mobo, etc.

Raptors may not be worth it as then you'll need a SATA controller (or a new mobo) since I doubt your current one has plugs for them. How full are your current PATAs? If they are really full, that could be part of the problem. Have you defragged in a while?

If the burner is bothering you, a 20X Samsung burner is like under $30 these days.

I doubt you need anything else.