Upgrade Advice

[S Freud]

So I got in on the E-Machines black Friday deal, I know that they are not a very good company and people have their opinions but I needed a cheap reliable desktop so I got in on it. That aside here is my question...

I want to upgrade a few things, I already bought a 250GB HD for it, I need to know if I can put it in with the existing 100GB HD or I need to take it out. I also want to know what I can upgrade and what I can't, I am looking at doing the following

some light gaming, Unreal Tournament, WoW, Halo things like that.

Word Processing, excel, powerpoint.

Internet browsing, I want it to multi task well, I listen to music and run firefox with several tabs and downloading all at the same time.

I think thats about it, I listed everything about the system below, if there is anything else let me know.

Thanks

System:

E-Machines T3522
Intel Celeron CPU 3.33GHZ
504MB of RAM after shared video
I'm not sure of the motherboard, soundcard, or anything else...I will try to look it up.

 

[hofan41]

you'll see the most performance increases from upgrading your RAM. try 1 gig

 

[S Freud]

Anything Else?

 

[novice]

Does that particular system have a PCI express slot available? If so, you will certainly need to upgrade the video if you want to play games. While I am unfamiliar with the onboard video on that system, I assume it is an ATI Radeon 200 on board, which I can't imagine would do very well with Halo or any newer games.

 

[happy medium]

If it has a Pci-e slot,( which it should) just grab a 7900gs for 150.00$ deal at best buy.
Heres a link, this is a great deal and 4 times faster than your 5200 card


http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp...ctCategoryId=cat01151&id=1155072371459

 

[S Freud]

How can I find out if it hase a PCI express slot?

 

[Ruptga]

Open it up, look around the slots to see if it says something about PCIe on the motherboard. That's the simplest way, but if there's nothing printed on the mobo, you'll just have to go by what the slots look like. I don't know off the top of my head, but I'll bet ya Wikipedia has pictures that'll tell you what you're looking for.

AGP => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port
PCIe=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#Physical_Layer

Edit: Anyway, yeah, you'll definately get the most improvement by either putting in another gig (for 1.5GB), or going up to a full gig. Definately do that before even thinking of getting a 7900 anything.