if you can upgrade one thing and one thing only...

[b0mbrman]

The processor's your bottleneck there...

 

[Shaftatplanetquake]

You play 3d games?

If so, then upgrade the video.

If not, or just casually, upgrade the processor.

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

<< Processor. >>

 

[JSang]

processor.....although you should upgrade the vid card soon after that

 

[SagaLore]

my penis

 

[vi edit]

Speakers.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

<< The processor's your bottleneck there... >>



Not necessarily. The hard drive is the slowest component in a system. If he multitasks a lot and/or uses programs which demand lots of RAM, he could be using more than 256MB of memory consistently, meaning thath is computer is constantly hitting the swap file. If your computer is constantly swapping out to the HD, more RAM might yield more performance than a faster processor. Why? Because most of the time your processor is sitting idle waiting for information from the HD.
I know that was certainly true for me at least. Now that I have 512MB, it's no longer an issue though.

 

[lawaris]

<< Processor. >>

 

[Beau]

<<

<< Processor. >>

>>

 

[Thegonagle]

<< Processor. >>

Yup.

 

[mdennison]

It's pretty close between your processor and video card. I'm leaning towards the video card...

 

[Rivergater]

I have the A7V with Duron 600.
The max speed this mobo can handle is 1.2

I'm currently running win2k and have a 7200 rpm drive.

When I monitor Norton System Doctor, I notice that my CPU utilization doesn't go above 80% usage except when it peaks for less than a second when i start an application. When I first posed the question, I was leaning towards upgrading the ram.

After reading Sir Fred's comment, I think I'll definitely upgrade the ram now and maybe compromise between the cpu and video card.

Thanks fellas.