I am wondering if it is worth it to upgrade a few components or to simply buy a new computer. My system is at least four years old.

I currently have a:   Seanix SIS-650 mother board
                                Intel Pentium 4 Socket 478 mPGA
                                2x512mg PC133 RAM (all the board will hold)
                                Windows XP
                                I am unsure of my power supply

What do you all think is the verdict?
Thanks
PaulMy advice [if it were mine] would not invest any$$$ in the old systemThanks Xavier,
When I have looked at the price of new computers I wondered if it would make more sense to buy new, though the idea of the planned obsolescence is difficult for me. If I buy new I will undoubtedly donate my old one.
Thanks
PaulYour welcome: When you have an idea what system you are interested in post the components on this site & ask what do we think of what the PC contains. You mignh WANT to go to      web sites like  newegg.com     or   tigerdirect to see what is out there.Thanks again Xavier,
As money is tight I may have to wait a while. What are your thoughts about refurbished computers from some place like tiger direct?
PaulI never looked into refurbished units mabe someone else reading this post can give some input. WARRENTY would be the main issueLet's start with a budget and go from there...Any particular reason you're dissatisfied with your computer's performance now?  What's the processor speed?  You have a plenty of memory, with 1GB, for many tasks with Windows XP.  What's the video part of your system (ONBOARD or add-on card)?

Do you use file cleanup tools such as CCleaner?  Do you use any spyware detection/removal tools?  Do you defrag your hard drive?  In other words, do you try to keep your system optimized for best peformance?

Hey SOYBEAN,
Yes, i should have mentioned that I was looking to upgrade because my computer was rather sluggish. I wasn't sure if it was the RAM, or some other COMPONENT. Being rather new to working with computer components and some of these questions I wasn't sure. as you had suggested, it was quite a while since my last 'cleaning' of the system. It clearly needed to be defraged and I have since cleaned the system with nCleaner which seems like a pretty good system cleaner.

Upon further investigation, I realize that I have a 80GB hard drive and it was very, very full which could have been the reason for it seeming sluggish. After talking to a friend who has some knowledge of computers it seems one solution is to buy an new external harddrive. This way when someday this computer is obsolete this new external hard drive would still be usable with a new system and this would free up my current internal hard drive thereby hopefully returning the system to it's reasonably speedy processing.

What do you think of this solution and what do you think of the Western Digital Elements 500GB 3.5" External Hard Drive - 7200, USB 2.0?
Thanks,
Paulit all depends on what you are using your computer for, ie: games, music or video production as to what spec you want.
speed of the system dont depent too much on the size nor make of an hardrive at all.
just look at ram sizes and speed ect. also same for processor. eg: clock speed. also more cache can be good too.I will be using it mostly for serving the net, word processing, excel, and power point to the max as am in grad school and of course many family pics.

I figured that since my hard drive was so full and I am only going to be adding to it that a new hard drive was in order one way or another.Buy a new bigger internal drive and then "clone" the pld drive to the new one....
The external choice is nothing but a band-aid as Windows won't boot to an external without a big struggle...Given that much of what is on my hard drive is storage items, pics, documents, etc I would only be using the extra drive for storage. Why would I need or want to boot to the new drive?
Quote from: x-garfield-x on October 19, 2008, 03:22:44 PM

speed of the system dont depent too much on the size nor make of an hardrive at all.

Given that much of what is on my hard drive is storage items, pics, documents, etc I would only be using the extra drive for storage. Why would I need or want to boot to the new drive?