Home PC upgrade : Advice please

[tkedwards]

Hi

I currently have a home built Penium III 1000Mhz + 1Gb RAM + 32MB AGP graphics gard with a new 240Gb harddrive - which 4 yrs OK was pretty good! I use my PC for home broadband connection at a lowly 512k bandwidth. And use the PC for digital photos/home videos and usual light office stuff. I run Windows XP, Symantec antivirus and SP firewall.

Current motherboard will not take a higher speed CPU - and I think the RAM I have installed will not directly transfer to the new DDR2 SDRAM sockets

It suffers froms low response when picture editing and video editing is next to impossible.

If I want to improve this and general speed about the place - where best do I invest 150quid.

Go for a new graphics card only at 30 quid or so.

Or go for a Pentium 4 2.6Ghz D 805 with 1Gb and an ASUS motherboard with a built in graphcs card like Asus P5RD2-VW which would come in at more like 200 quid. Or should I go for some of the cheaper CPUs - if so which ??

Your views and advice would be appreciated- thanks

Tim

[aldi]

Don't bother with the graphics card, wouldn't have thought it would help much in your situation. Mobo+chip it looks like, allthough your choice will be limited these days if you want to keep that AGP graphics card. I take it your RAM is PC133?

[Zad]

Stick with it for another 6 months and save up enough money to buy a proper upgrade. Don't bother with Intel CPUS, AMD units give much more bang per buck. Don't even think about motherboard integrated graphics for Photoshop, it's really not a serious solution. Your old memory will not work in new systems, nor will your AGP graphics card work in modern PCI Express units. You can get motherboards with AGP slots, but that is tying you in to an old slower standard.