OLD COMPUTER UPGRADE MEMORY

[GCBR]

I have a 8 year old computer which my son uses but the memory is small ,I am wanting to upgrade the memory but i can only add to 2GB, is it the cpu and motherboard that stops me adding more, and if so will i have to change both or can i get away with just the cpu its a pentium 4 in it just now.

many thanks grant

[Jelly Bean]

Hello and welcome GCBR.

 

Firstly could you post the make and model of the computer and hardware specifications as this will help us decide what can be done.

 

You may only be able to upgrade the CPU to a slightly higher grade one and I am afraid to say 2 gig RAM will be the mainboards limit.As it is an older machine is it worth upgrading the mainboard,GPU,PSU and so on?

 

I would simply add the 2 gig RAM and maybe a larger hard drive and reinstall the Windows Operating System.

 

An older PC I would simply buy 2 gig of Kingston Value RAM.If the computer has 4 slots then it will take 512 mb sticks for each slot.As the graphics card has RAM dedicated to it via RAM sticks to function.

 

Give the internals a good clean out.

 

We are talking about an older machine and personaly I would just add the RAM...

 

JB.

[joddle]

I was in a similar situation a little while back and decided not to upgrade the older machine for the following reasons

a) it is old,

b) it was noisy

c) it was slow

d) did not seem cost effective

 

Instead I simply bought a more modern PC cheaply off ebay - I opted for a dell 755 for the following reasons

 

a) I already had two such machines and they are very quiet and reliable

b) it has a dual core processor and with 32bit OS is can take 3.35gb of memory (much more if a 64bit OS is used)

c) as these dell machines have the licence code built into the bios it is easy to rebuld the machine from any disk

d) they are pretty cheap - I paid only £50 for a 3gb machine with 2gb of memory - and you get a rugged machine

[ukbobboy]

Hi GCBR

 

I, like some others, believe that an 8 year old PC is well past its sell by date, plus its going to be somewhat difficult to find to perform any form of upgrade.

 

That said, you should realise that the memory a computer can take is limited by the motherboard (aka mainboard) so if your old PC can only take 2GB then that is the maximum you are stuck with, my (very) old PC could only take 512MB.

 

As for the CPU, you may be able to upgrade to a more powerful model but it has to be within the model group, in your case a pentium 4 and not something like an Intel i3 (or any of the "i" groups.

 

Saying all that, I'm inclined to agree with the guy that said you should buy a cheap replacement PC, you will get something more modern, i.e more memory, faster processor and bigger HD and all without the expense and bother of trying to squeeze more performance out of something on its last legs.

 

Good Luck

 

 

UK Bob

[GCBR]

thanks everyone , think i will use the shell and upgrade everything ,keeping the harddrive

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, be aware the hard drive will be the older IDE type, whereas now most things are SATA, you may still be able to find a motherboard with both ports or sockets.

However, my advice is to go the full distance and buy a new and therefore much bigger hard drive, plus a Windows 7 disk. Also obtain an IDE caddy to put the old drive into so you can run it as an external drive if all that is needed is data off it.

 

One of the reasons for saying this is that the windows XP on the old drive will refuse to boot when it sees a new environment of modern motherboard. You can get round that by doing a Windows repair, but you need a full Windows XP disk to do one.

 

Nev.