Worth replacing Sempro with Athlon64?

[geepondy]

Girlfriend has Compaq pc with 2.2ghz Sempron 3800. I have researched and computer can take up to a 2.4 ghz Athlon so this would be the 3800 Athlon 64. When I use the computer I notice it's kind of on the sluggish side even with just regular web browsing, etc. and wondered if it would be worth paying the $60 or so to get an Athlon? Is the only difference the difference in size of chache memory? If it would take the X2 processors then it would be a non brainer but it doesn't. The system ahs 512 meg of memory and runs XP.

 

[jjmIII]

Maybe if you could find one used, but I wouldn't spend 60. You would benefit from another 512 of memory.

 

[nonameo]

clean install?

 

[lyssword]

I'm guessing that's a Socket 754

 

[geepondy]

No, it's Am2 but it doesn't take X2 CPUs. Here is the mb inside it.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfr...roduct=3239113&lang=en

 

[myocardia]

According to my research, that board supports dual-cores just fine,since all of these people have it in their HP's/Compaq's with X2's.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: jjmIII
You would benefit from another 512 of memory.

I second this. See if it is using one stick of 512MB. If so, then add a second stick. If not (using two 256MB) then toss the existing RAM and buy a cheap 2GB dual channel DDR2-667 kit for $45 (or DDR2-800 for $55). That should speed things up more than a faster CPU.

If you want to spend more than that, then go ahead and upgrade the CPU after the RAM upgrade.

 

[geepondy]

Interesting about the possibility of supporting X2 CPUs. I thought it might too but the mb specs at HP site and the HP tech I talked with said it will only support single core cpus.

 

[JWade]

thats tech support for ya, i forget how many times tech support have told people laptops will only support 1gb of ram, and i put 2gb in it for them and works without any problems.

by looking at the specs fo the board, i would have to say by the chipset it supports dual core.

 

[NoSoup4You]

2.2Ghz Sempron is more than enough for web browsing. Do a clean install of Windows first before shelling out for a computer that's just being used for surfing the web...

 

[bryanW1995]

no clean install necessary. she is running out of ram, plain and simple. zap has the correct recommendation. you can always upgrade to an x2 if the ram doesn't fix the problem.

 

[996GT2]

More RAM is the best thing to do at the moment. Look in hot deals and grab 2 1 GB sticks of the HP Branded Crucial DDR2-667 for $9.50 each after rebates. Put that 2 GB in your system (remove what RAM is already in there) and the system shouldn't be sluggish anymore.

 

[jjmIII]

Originally posted by: JWade
...i would have to say by the chipset it supports dual core.

I'll second that .

 

[geepondy]

I should have opened it up when I had it to see what the RAM configuration is and whether it has open slots. It put ZA Suite and Superantispyware so that sucks up some memory and also she insists in opening yahoo messenger at bootup whether she is using it or not.

 

[alcoholbob]

You guys sure RAM is the reason?

XP has a really low overhead (compared to Vista). I remember it was only ~200mb of RAM when loading up the kernel. While upgrading to 1gig should help I don't remember that much of a difference for "web surfing". I even played Oblivion on 512mb of RAM!

Of course it's been a long time since I've used XP or had 512mb of RAM, so I'm sure someone will correct me. Vista is such a memory hog, it's 600-800mb just to load the kernel! (up to 4x more than XP).

Yeah, and if it's AM2 it *has* to support X2, I can't see how it can't, since even my neolithic 939 that I bought 3 years ago when the top end was 3200+ single core, and it supports up to Opteron 180/FX-60.

 

[Explosivo]

I was running XP with a 2.4Ghz single core earlier this year on 512mb of memory and upgrading to 1gb made a huge difference, everything ran much smoother. Id second the recommendation to get that HP DDR2 in Hot Deals.

 

[JWade]

put a 1gb stick in there for a total of 1.5gb of ram, it will be a big increase, but i would still go dual core also, prices are cheap enough, it will be like a new computer for her. I am doing a similiar upgrade, compaq machine with a sempron, but with 256mb ram, going to an x2 and 1.25gb of ram (adding two 512mb sticks) guy wont recognize its his computer by how it performs (oh, also going from onboard video to a pci-e video card too)

 

[geepondy]

The system was bought last December, long after the introduction of X2. I wonder if HP disabled some of the features of the mb because the manual itself does only mention support for Sempron and Athlong, not X2.

 

[magreen]

I had a P4 1.8A @2GHz with 512 mb ram in win2k and the thing crawled because it was always swapping to disk. No matter what you did you'd hear the hdd grinding away while you waited for something to happen. And it was clean of spyware and viruses acc to adaware and avg. I doubt xp uses less mem than 2k.

With all that disk swapping she won't even notice the cpu upgrade, and you'll end up feeling like a chump. Get her more ram - 1gb dual chan kit for $30 shipped from newegg, or that 10$ for 1gb shipped rebate deal over in hotdeals. 2gb is overkill.

Also, even if the chipset supports x2 that doesn't mean compaq's bios does.

 

[robmurphy]

If the machine is a Compaq/HP it will have a large amount of baggage. Check the windows update, thats probably on, if its on turn it off and check for updates manually. The security center will moan about this. Windows update can really slow the machine down and often it wants to run most of the time. Check the antivirus/antispyware, if its norton it will kill the machine. I have a HP machine with an S939 Sempron 3400+. This only had 512M memory and it ran fine after getting rid of the extras that HP had installed. Use task manager to see which processes are eating up the CPU. Windows defender from Microsoft has a software explorer that allows you to view what's started when the machine boots, and allows you to disable/stop that software.

If its slowed down noticably since new then the machine has probably pickup some nasties from the net. Try scanning with at least 3 utilities and see if that improves things. It may not. I had one nastie that all the spyware and anti virus software I tried would not find and remove so I just re-installed the OS. I was lucky enough to have the HP XP-Pro disks so I went from XP-Home to XP-Pro. This made a big difference in speed. If you do not have the CDs the machine should have a recovery partition and you can recover the machine to the state it was bought very easily from that. This will however re-install all the HP/Compaq baggage which you then need to remove. It will also remove any software installed since the machine was purchased.

An upgrade to 1 Gig of memory would make sense, but the machine should run OK with 512M. I have had 4 machines with XP-Pro and 512M memory and they all ran fine once any excess baggage was removed. 1 Gig does help if your are running many applications at once, e.g. word, multiple excell spreadsheets, and some photo manipulation programs.

On a seperate note I have run Win2K on machines with 128M and 256M of memory and it ran fine. You do not need 512M for Win2K.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I'd focus more on removing bloat, reinstalling XP with perhaps an OEM CD rather than the Compaq CD, and adding more memory.

I have an old Dell with a 2.533Ghz P4 no HT and a measly GeForce 4 MX420 64MB card and 512MB of RAM.

The thing was crap slow. When the server went down (Soyo mobo blew some caps), we took the memory from it and put it in the Dell. With 1GB of memory the system is soooo much smoother. Even gaming saw a huge improvement.

The second option would be to run Windows 2000. With no bloat and all that crap it just simply works, and works smoothly. Heck me and bro just recently started using Windows Server 2003 in our server. Before then we just used Windows 2000. Its just reliable, and it works. I would recommend that if you don't want to put any money in it.

Windows 2000
AVG antivirus
AVG antispyware
FoxIt PDF reader
VLC media player
Combined Community Codec Pack

With those few things right there you can do pretty much anything you want browsing / entertainment wise. And do it smoothly and efficiently.