Upgrade or Replace slow Dell?

[manboob]

Hi All

 

Wonder if I could get any opinions on the following.

 

I have an old (2005) Dell Dimension 5000 with 150gb HD, pentium 4 CPU 3.0 Ghz and 512 RAM. Its a family PC and recently it has started to run very slowly. There is over 100gb space left on the HD.

 

I have defragged it, virus checked it, done the CHK disk thing when it boots up, C.cleaned it, ran spyware and malware and even restored it to an earlier point but has made no difference. It still runs very slow and sounds like the hard drive is working over time all the time even when its just sitting there idle.

 

Thinking about getting rid and replacing as its prob not worth upgrading - but thought I would run it past the experts first if this sounds like appropriate course of action?

 

Thanks for your responses in advance.

 

M.B

[Dalo Harkin]

I would do a complete OS reinstall first as the lags can be just years of rubbish installed and uninstalled and orphan files etc.

 

If you do a reinstall (make sure you get any data you want to keep off the drive) if when you have reinstalled to the point where all the Windows updates are installed (service packs etc) and its still slow then you can either replace the HDD or as you say get a newer PC

[Tony D]

You may need a RAM upgrade. with SP-3 you need more than 512 MB RAM. How much RAM is in your system?

[manboob]

Hi all

 

Thanks for the advice - I'll try a reinstall over the weekend.

 

I could get more RAM as 512 is pretty slow these days tho will try the reinstall first to see if that wakes it up a bit and then maybe more RAM.

 

Thanks for your help

 

MB