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Originally Posted by stevem
Dawsey,
Always salvage what you can, like from above keep HDD, CD burner. I'm longtime user and fan of AMD processors, so I would recommend upgrading to an AMD 64 (as higher speed as the budget will stretch).
The motherboard, you'll need to get a socket 939 to take the AMD chip. You can become creative here, and look around. Mobo's these days come in all flavours, and unless your really going after cutting edge sound and graphics, get a mobo with onboard audio and video. Take a look at Gigabtye GA-K8N51GMF-9, retailing in Sydney at the AUD$153
All mobo's these days have onboard LAN, and some will even come with firewire and wireless. You may need to keep your wireless card is necessary.
I would also recommend upgrading your HDD to at least 120Gb, depending on the age of your existing on. Dont worry about SATA, stick with parallel disk drives for the time being. If your older HDD is OK, then I would use that as my C drive, the whole 60Gb, and then use the new drive as the D, and put everything on there.
I would recommend throwing away the 96mb of RAM and get a matching stick of 256Mb, just keep on eye on the speed. That will give you 512Mb, so you can upgrade to XP.
Going on prices in Sydney at the moment, the above will set you back around AUD$700. A great system for a small price tab.
Let me know if you want any further help
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Many thanks Steve.
A pretty comprehensive reply
Much as I expected, change motherboard and processor,and get extra RAM. I did try to upgrade to XP and just got the dreaded blue screen so I'm guessing not enough RAM then. Thats that question answered. I forgot to say I still have the original 9.6Gb hard disc thats doing nothing so it would be wise to remove that and replace with at least another 60Gb? Hard discs are so cheap now that theres not a lot of difference in price here in UK between 60/80/120discs. I only have 2 hard drive slots.
I assume new processors come with cooling fan?
Once Xmas is out of the way I think I'll treat myself
Thanks again