Polishwonder74
Senior member
If I were in your shoes:
Slam it full of memory (512MB would be superb), use Crucial.com, and BE CAREFUL. I've had a HELL of a time getting memory for Dells (obvious attempt to bastardize as much as possible so you'll pay 3X cost to get RAM right from Dell. They use rediculous combinations of buffered, unbuffered, ecc, etc. . .)
That hard drive might be OK, but getting a new one won't help very much unless you mate it with an ATA133 PCI card, and hopefully the BIOS on that computer is smart enough to be able to boot from PCI.
Go ahead and use WindowsXP. The only particularly huge difference between 2000 and XP is the graphics on the menus (much prettier and more useful on XP), which that video card should be able to handle relatively gracefully. As long as you've got lots of RAM it'll run like a scared cat.
So 512MB of RAM, and a hard drive plus PCT ATA133 card outta do it. If the cost of your upgrades starts approaching $400 or more, you can just build a new one.
Slam it full of memory (512MB would be superb), use Crucial.com, and BE CAREFUL. I've had a HELL of a time getting memory for Dells (obvious attempt to bastardize as much as possible so you'll pay 3X cost to get RAM right from Dell. They use rediculous combinations of buffered, unbuffered, ecc, etc. . .)
That hard drive might be OK, but getting a new one won't help very much unless you mate it with an ATA133 PCI card, and hopefully the BIOS on that computer is smart enough to be able to boot from PCI.
Go ahead and use WindowsXP. The only particularly huge difference between 2000 and XP is the graphics on the menus (much prettier and more useful on XP), which that video card should be able to handle relatively gracefully. As long as you've got lots of RAM it'll run like a scared cat.
So 512MB of RAM, and a hard drive plus PCT ATA133 card outta do it. If the cost of your upgrades starts approaching $400 or more, you can just build a new one.
