Would more RAM be worthwhile?

[Texas Diesel]

Win 2000, 256MB DDR, Athalon 900 (should I overclock it?) Plan to upgrade to 1. 5 or 2 GHz.

 

[Philip]

If all you are doing is Internet surfing and lite business type of apps. Then a memory upgrade might not help.



If you do video editing and other intensive apps Then memory will help a lot.



As far as overclocking. You might want to check you motherboard and see if it has a PCI divider lock to hold the PCI bus at 33 mgz. If it doesn't that would limit you on how much you could overclock. A PCI bus out of spec very far causes data corruption and other problems. I don't overclock.



If you have not changed out a hard drive in that computer sense it was built. The hard drive is a big bottle neck. A 3 to 4 year old hard drive is slow when compared to todays drives.

 

[Texas Diesel]

The HD(s) are 7200 RPM UDMA 66, what is current?

 

[TPCDrafting]

If you're running AutoCAD, it'll gobble up as much ram as you can throw at it.

 

[Philip]

You didn't state if your HDD was a 2 meg or a 8 meg cache model of HDD. If it is an older 2 meg cache drive. The 7200 8meg model would be a good improvement over a 2 meg.



I use a 15K SCSI drive a my OS drive. So I haven't kept up to much on the ATA line of drives. The SATA drives seem to get good reviews. But you would need a controller card to use it. I wouldn't think of a SATA drive with the SATA to IDE converters.



This site gives some good reviews on HDD and they run them on bench marks against other drives. It might be worth doing some reading if you are thinking about doing some upgrading in the near future.



http://www.storagereview.com/



In building a new rig. I would reccommend the SATA drive if you didn't want to invest in a SCSI drive system.

 

[JHerrlich]

Beyond 256MB is going seriously past the point of diminishing returns with Win2000. If, on the other hand, you were running WinXP, I would recommend at least 512MB. BTW, if you're running things like the online game EverQuest, you need as much as you can get.

 

[Texas Diesel]

Thanks, I'll leave it alone then.

 

[slo-ryde]

Have to agree with JHerrlich on memory. Anything beyond 256mb provides a very small return on your investment.



Upgrading to faster hard drives doesn't buy much if the IDE controller on the motherboard won't handle the extra bandwidth.



Probably the best upgrade is a new video card, the faster chipset will give you a nice visual boost. When the video is humming the PC seems much faster. If your motherboard supports AGP then look for something with 64 or 128 mb of memory. You can get a really nice 128mb AGP card for around $90.

 

[Cowboy Medic]

I just bought a new computer with the XP media center. It has 1 gig of RAM and is expandable to 4gig. I can't believe how much stuff I can have it doing simultaneously and not even notice a slowdown. DVD playing running three or four internet windows, typing away on a word document, having the Musicmatch Jukebox upgrading track tags. I am just floored. of course I upgraded from a 400mhz celeron and 128meg of RAM. I figure it is just like the cummins... ... ... ... ..... MORE POWER