Aside from sticking in a new dvd burner and a 512mb stick of ram (all I had laying around that would fit this mobo) the specs are pretty much the same as when it was taken out of the box.
Now I know computers have gotten dirt cheap these days, but neither I nor my family can afford to buy one right now, so that is not an option. Right now I have $25 to put towards this thing, and I can’t decide what would be better.
I’m trying to decide between upgrading to 2gb of ram, or getting a used vid card of ebay, since i don’t have enough to do both.
Right now I’d be happy to get it to run D2 or Warcraft 3, or Farmville on Facebook without it grinding to a halt. (The 3 most used programs on here aside from XP.)
I can’t speak for the games, but for Farmville or Facebook (isn’t Farmville run via Facebook anyways), you’ll be much better off with the ram as the video card isn’t going to help with your internet connection.
From your comment about the 512 of ram, I’m guessing there are 2 memory slots and you have a total of 768M in there now. In that case, yes, RAM is your best option. Windows allocates a file on your boot drive that starts around the same size as your memory. When the operating system, XP, needs more memory than it has, it uses that file to offload things that are currently in RAM memory but aren’t being used. This is called “paging” and the file where the unused bytes go is the page file.
Since a hard drive is several orders of magnitude slower than RAM, this is the main thing that will slow your system down. So by upgrading to 2G, the improvement should be significant and welcomed.
Absolutely, max out your RAM first and foremost. There is a memory analyzer at www.crucial.com that will look under the hood and tell you exactly what you can put into your machine, and of course will sell it to you, too, if you like.
The biggest boost I ever got was upgrading from 512MB of RAM to 1GB (1024MB). The booting took the same amount of time, but, after that, everything was faster. The next biggest was going from 1GB to 1.5 GB. I do not know how I ever put up with only 512MB.
Do make sure your motherboard supports 2 GB, and that the memory you are trying to get is compatible. That last part is why I’m only up to 1.5GB, instead of maxing out my old eMachine at 2 GB. A 512MB stick was over $40 last I checked.