For you hardware experts out there:
I bought a Quantex PII 4 years ago and have upgraded it a few times since. Currently, it's a Celeron 850 with 196 megs RAM and has two hard drives, 5 gigs and 8 gigs (I think both are probably 5400 rpm and ATA-66, but I'm not completely sure). I'm running Win XP on this system right now, but even when it was running on Win 98 last year, I thought it ran a bit slow. I keep the system files pretty well maintained; i.e. I defrag regularly and try to keep as many files as possible running off the slave hd so that my OS can run faster from the primary hd.
So here's my question--what's the most cost efficient way to get a faster computer? Should I upgrade this computer (and if so, which part?), or should I just wait about a year and then get a new computer altogether? There are a bunch of different factors that I'm considering, and I'm not sure how much weight to give to each one.
- what's the major bottleneck in speed for running everyday applications (e.g. e-mail, internet, and music) right now? is it the processor, the hard drive access and transfer speed, or other things like an old mobo chipset? i'm still using the original PII motherboard--i upgraded to a celeron by using a converter board and overclocked a 566 celeron by 50%. so is there one thing that's slowing down my system a lot more than anything else, or is it a combo of a bunch of different things?
- the computer is already 4 years old. if i do decide to upgrade by getting a new mobo/processor combo or something, is there a decent chance that some other part of the computer will fail during the next few years? if so, i'd rather save the headache of going without a computer for a week while i order parts, and instead, get a new computer in the near future.
I've been using this forum for a couple of years now, and it's been awesome. This is my first post, though, so let's see what happens. ;-)
I bought a Quantex PII 4 years ago and have upgraded it a few times since. Currently, it's a Celeron 850 with 196 megs RAM and has two hard drives, 5 gigs and 8 gigs (I think both are probably 5400 rpm and ATA-66, but I'm not completely sure). I'm running Win XP on this system right now, but even when it was running on Win 98 last year, I thought it ran a bit slow. I keep the system files pretty well maintained; i.e. I defrag regularly and try to keep as many files as possible running off the slave hd so that my OS can run faster from the primary hd.
So here's my question--what's the most cost efficient way to get a faster computer? Should I upgrade this computer (and if so, which part?), or should I just wait about a year and then get a new computer altogether? There are a bunch of different factors that I'm considering, and I'm not sure how much weight to give to each one.
- what's the major bottleneck in speed for running everyday applications (e.g. e-mail, internet, and music) right now? is it the processor, the hard drive access and transfer speed, or other things like an old mobo chipset? i'm still using the original PII motherboard--i upgraded to a celeron by using a converter board and overclocked a 566 celeron by 50%. so is there one thing that's slowing down my system a lot more than anything else, or is it a combo of a bunch of different things?
- the computer is already 4 years old. if i do decide to upgrade by getting a new mobo/processor combo or something, is there a decent chance that some other part of the computer will fail during the next few years? if so, i'd rather save the headache of going without a computer for a week while i order parts, and instead, get a new computer in the near future.
I've been using this forum for a couple of years now, and it's been awesome. This is my first post, though, so let's see what happens. ;-)
