To upgrade or not to upgrade... Advice welcomed!!

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Ben

I have a very old PC (in computer years!), its about 4 years old. Its a PII
MMX. It only has an onboard video card (8Mb), do you believe that?!... And
128Mb RAM.

Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping in a
128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the upgrade?

It will be used by my mum for home purposes, probably just surfing the net
and emailing. So, worth the hassles or get a newer PC?
 
I have a very old PC (in computer years!), its about 4 years old. Its a PII
MMX. It only has an onboard video card (8Mb), do you believe that?!... And
128Mb RAM.

Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping in a
128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the upgrade?
Click to expand...

Depends on what you need to do with it. If you wanted turn
it into a (large) fileserver, adding the memory would help.
Agressive use with large files or multitasking would benefit
too, but the CPU is a real limitation too, so it's hard to
justify pouring more $$ into the system, would make more
sense if you already had the spare memory lying around.

The video card upgrade isn't going to be cost effective,
unless you happened to find something like a Geforce2MX for
$10 after rebate on sale this week at Compusa,

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=293736&pfp=ldaysale

(Or found something used on ebay/etc).
It will be used by my mum for home purposes, probably just surfing the net
and emailing. So, worth the hassles or get a newer PC?
Click to expand...

If it's running Windows 2K or XP, it'd help to add at least
64MB of memory, but for those basic uses and Win95/98/ME, it
might be best to leave it as-is, though if there will be any
valuable data stored on it, a hard drive replacement might
be in order, since the original hard drive would be getting
near the end of it's expected lifespan at this point, and a
new drive might also be a significant performance boost for
these tasks, even if only running in ATA33 mode, but be
aware of the potential that the motherboard might need a
bios update to support larger drive sizes, and even then l
might not see more than 120GB sized drives. A PCI IDE
controller card can overcome this, but again it's more
"non-essential" $$ spent with diminishing returns for a
system that age and performance level.
 
Ben said:
I have a very old PC (in computer years!), its about 4 years old. Its a PII
MMX. It only has an onboard video card (8Mb), do you believe that?!... And
128Mb RAM.

Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping in a
128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the upgrade?

It will be used by my mum for home purposes, probably just surfing the net
and emailing. So, worth the hassles or get a newer PC?
Click to expand...
Not to upgrade. Your hardware is not just old, but very very very old.
Get a new PC or shop around for a second hand with better specs.


Chris
 
" Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping in a
128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the upgrade? "


A new graphics card would be a waste if it's just for surfing and e-mail,
and the motherboard may not even have an AGP port anyway.

You should check out your motherboard specs and see if you can upgrade the
CPU. Is it definitely a Slot 1 motherboard? If so, then it might support up
to a 133FSB Pentium III 1Ghz, or even up to a Socket 370 Tualatin 1400Mhz by
using an adaptor.

An upgrade to 256MB RAM may also be worth it. I suspect the motherboard
only supports SDRAM, so, depending on the CPU you can get, you might need to
opt for PC133 SDRAM.

For between $100AU and $150AU, you could quadruple the power of the system.
The cheapest option is to buy through eBay, and you can even sell your old
CPU and RAM there afterwards. You may also find these two newsgroups
helpful:

aus.ads.forsale.computers.new
aus.ads.forsale.computers.used

There will be many traders there who may also have what you need.
 
Ben said:
I have a very old PC (in computer years!), its about 4 years old. Its
a PII MMX. It only has an onboard video card (8Mb), do you believe
that?!... And 128Mb RAM.

Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping
in a 128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the
upgrade?

It will be used by my mum for home purposes, probably just surfing
the net and emailing. So, worth the hassles or get a newer PC?
Click to expand...


A PII 300 with 256MB of RAM and a 4GB HDD will run Windows 2000 well and
Windows 98 better still. A fresh install of the OS may also be in order.
Considering the use it's likely to have from Mum, I wouldn't spend much
trying to upgrade it.
 
I have a very old PC (in computer years!), its about 4 years old. Its a PII
MMX. It only has an onboard video card (8Mb), do you believe that?!... And
128Mb RAM.

Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping in a
128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the upgrade?

It will be used by my mum for home purposes, probably just surfing the net
and emailing. So, worth the hassles or get a newer PC?
Click to expand...

Spending a penny on a PII machine is to much. The cheapest modern machine
will run rings around your old box and it might even cost less then doing
an upgrade.
 
S.Heenan said:
A PII 300 with 256MB of RAM and a 4GB HDD will run Windows 2000 well
and Windows 98 better still. A fresh install of the OS may also be in
order. Considering the use it's likely to have from Mum, I wouldn't
spend much trying to upgrade it.
Click to expand...

I've just put a PII 450Mhz with 128MB SDRAM and a 1x 8MB AGP card, 20GB HDD
from parts I was given, with a fresh install of 98SE the thing flies! A few
tweaks like a fixed swapfile of 256MB set up immediately after the OS
install so it's really close to the start of the drive (outside edge, faster
access).

Reading these responses I think there are a few young guys here who seem to
think they have to have the latest and greatest to surf the net or write an
email. This is for the guy's mother FFS! It's a perfectly fine PC for the
required use. You guys are spoilt. <sits in rocking-chair on the porch> I
remember when going from 4MB RAM to 8MB cost me $100 per MB and the machine
still took all day to do anything.

Of course, for my own use I have a Tbred B running at 200Mhz x 10.5 for
2.1Ghz on an nForce2 Ultra 400 board (that kicks P4 butt up to 3Ghz), 1024MB
dual-channel RAM, 128MB graphics card etc. etc. etc. I'm a bit of a gamer
(on a budget), this guy's mother isn't I think.

It's all about perspective and not who can piss the furthest. After all, you
only need to get it into the bowl.

Geta grip, there are some perfectly fine, functional machines that people
are trashing out of ego. Filling our land-fills and generally wasting
resources.
 
Ben said:
I have a very old PC (in computer years!), its about 4 years old. Its
a PII MMX. It only has an onboard video card (8Mb), do you believe
that?!... And 128Mb RAM.

Any advice on whether it's worth changing to 256Mb RAM and dropping
in a 128Mb (or even a 64Mb) video card? Will it even handle the
upgrade?

It will be used by my mum for home purposes, probably just surfing
the net and emailing. So, worth the hassles or get a newer PC?
Click to expand...

Use it as it is. A fresh install of 98SE and it should do fine for what your
mum needs it to do. PII doesn't tell us much though, there were 233Mhz PII's
and there were 450Mhz PII's, 66Mhz and 100Mhz system bus respectively. Large
difference in performance. The 233 wasn't much better than a P1 MMX really.
The 450 was a pretty good CPU.
 
~misfit~ said:
I've just put a PII 450Mhz with 128MB SDRAM and a 1x 8MB AGP card,
20GB HDD from parts I was given, with a fresh install of 98SE the
thing flies! A few tweaks like a fixed swapfile of 256MB set up
immediately after the OS install so it's really close to the start of
the drive (outside edge, faster access).
Click to expand...


Ben, the OP said the PC would be for email and surfing. Most anything from a
P100 up are fully capable of those tasks.

I've built several machines from salvaged parts and given them away. A PII
450 is still a very decent machine for mundane tasks. I prefer Windows 2000
for stability, though Win98 is quite fast, as you say. It's a shame to have
perfectly good, but dated parts collecting dust.
 
S.Heenan said:
Ben, the OP said the PC would be for email and surfing. Most anything
from a P100 up are fully capable of those tasks.

I've built several machines from salvaged parts and given them away.
A PII 450 is still a very decent machine for mundane tasks. I prefer
Windows 2000 for stability, though Win98 is quite fast, as you say.
It's a shame to have perfectly good, but dated parts collecting dust.
Click to expand...

I'd prefer Win2K too but unfortunately don't own it.
 
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