Which upgrades to speedup sluggish PC - Under £100

[thepeoplespal]

Which upgrades would you suggest to help speedup my sluggish PC with the overall upgrade price kept to under £100 (thats the hard bit)

My PC spec is this:

NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 32MB - AGP Graphics Card
Realtek AC'97 Audio for VIA built-in sound
40Gb and 80Gb HDDs
Socket A Processor x86 Family 6 Model 4 Stepping 4 AuthenticAMD ~1339 Mhz
XP Professional SP2
256MB DDR 2100 Memory
Gigabite KT400A MotherBoard (capable of taking AGP8x and DDR 400 memory - apparently)

My immediate thoughts are that the Graphics Card and the Memory need to be upgraded, but there are so many combinations of memory speeds and graphics cards I'm at a loss what to go for. Ideas and slagging off welcome.

[cuneus]

256k Ram and a graphics card if you play games

[JonRB]

Agreed - memory and graphics would see the biggest improvement.

I recently ditched my TNT2 graphics card for an nVidia GeForce4 MX440 and the difference is incredible. And it cost around £15 (including postage) off eBay.

You should easily be able to double your RAM as well in that budget.

>> Edited by JonRB on Monday 25th April 23:33

[mr-white]

go to www.ebuyer.co.uk

256mb memory - £15-£20
512mb memory - £54
XFX GeForce FX5500 256MB DDR - £50
xp 2200 thoroughbred processor - £53

those should give you a boost, depending on how much cash you wanna spend

MW

[mcflurry]

I would make the 80GB HDD the master, if it already isn't as generally the newer the drives the faster it is..

And then memory, then turn off the windows visual extras such as animated window openings, to make the pc seem quicker.

[thepeoplespal]

mr-white said:

go to www.ebuyer.co.uk 256mb memory - £15-£20 512mb memory - £54 XFX GeForce FX5500 256MB DDR - £50 xp 2200 thoroughbred processor - £53 those should give you a boost, depending on how much cash you wanna spend MW

I know I'm being a bit thick here, but does anyone have a clue as to the relative merits of each Graphics card, the numbers are just so diverse their doesn't appear to be anyway of telling which is better than another.

[d-man]

Memory first, XP is pretty memory hungry and as soon as you run out of memory your PC slows to a crawl, no matter how fast the rest of the system is. I'd add at least 512Mb.

TNT 2 is more than adequate graphics wise unless you play games.

Processor is more than adequate unless you do intensive stuff (play games, photo / video editing).

Might be an idea to just go with the memory first and then change other stuff later if its still not quick enough.

[JonRB]

Very very roughly, for nVidia you have the GeForce cards and then the FX cards.

So the GeForce4 MX440 that I mentioned is quite adequete but fairly old, which is reflected in the fact that they go for £10-£15 on eBay

The FX5200 is a more modern nVidia card (although still fairly old) which is why it is £50-odd.

[JonRB]

d-man said:

TNT 2 is more than adequate graphics wise unless you play games.

Indeed. But we all like to play the odd game occasionally, don't we? I found that the TNT2 is wholly inadequate for even older games like Command & Conquer Generals, but the £15 GeForce4 MX440 I got off eBay is quite sufficient. And at that price you'd be silly not to.

(BTW, I can't see any drop in quality for ordinary Windows work from switching from a TNT2 to an MX440, even at my flat panel's native 1600x1200)

[thepeoplespal]

What about the ATI family of Graphics cards?

[thepeoplespal]

Well the 2 sticks of 512MB PC3200 Elixir DDR SDRAM should arrive some time this week fingers crossed.
£54 including delivery and VAT - from Aria.

I'll see if that helps to start off with and try and find out the right graphics card to go for considering my small budget. Sort of have a hankering after a dual head graphics card and another monitor, but as ever I'm uncertain what to do about it.

I've an old 64MB ATi All in Wonder Pro sitting in my old PC would I be right in thinking that the TNT Nvidia 32MB is faster than it?

[JonRB]

thepeoplespal said:

What about the ATI family of Graphics cards?

I did say "for the nVidia range of cards". That's what we've mentioned so far.

But for completeness, "other makes of video card are available", "your mileage may vary", "things in the rear view mirror may be closer than they seem", etc. etc. etc.

I don't know anything about ATI cards, but I'm sure someone else does.

[puggit]

Did anyone mention memory yet?

[d-man]

You can pick up a Radeon 5500 for less than £50 with dual head, I'd say that ATI cards are slightly ahead of Nvidia at this price range and the Radeon 5500 should outperform an FX5200.

If you're not fussed about gaming performance a Radeon 9250 can be had for about £30, again with dual head. It isn't completely useless for games either but the extra £20 for the 5500 is probably worth it if you've got any interest in that.

[thepeoplespal]

d-man said:

You can pick up a Radeon 5500 for less than £50 with dual head, I'd say that ATI cards are slightly ahead of Nvidia at this price range and the Radeon 5500 should outperform an FX5200. If you're not fussed about gaming performance a Radeon 9250 can be had for about £30, again with dual head. It isn't completely useless for games either but the extra £20 for the 5500 is probably worth it if you've got any interest in that.

I've seen 9500's but not 5500s in the Ati range am I missing something per chance?

[d-man]

No, I meant 9550.... oops

Try to avoid the SEs as they're signficantly slower

[thepeoplespal]

Well the 1Gb of Ram appears to have given my PC a new lease of life.

[Neezer]

reformat a hard drive then reinstall windows using the NTFS file system.

Cost= Free.

Its amazing how much junk collects on your pc and slows it down..

[thepeoplespal]

Neezer said:

reformat a hard drive then reinstall windows using the NTFS file system. Cost= Free. Its amazing how much junk collects on your pc and slows it down..

While your advice is undoubtedly true, its the last thing on my mind, the thoughts of having to reinstall all that software again, just to get up and running puts me right off. Guess that is why I put off moving from my win95 350mhz system for such a long time, just too much hassle.