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Replacing Parents PC


awergh

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So since my parents PC is rather slow and I refuse to reformat to make it any faster or to free some space, the XP install is a bit over 2 years old.

Disclaimer: You might cringe at this hardware.

Mobo: Compaq board

Chipset: Intel 810

RAM: 320MB PC100

HDD: 20GB (Seagate)

CPU: Pentium III 800Mhz

Optical drive: 52x CDRW

Anyway it way past upgrading time.

At the moment my thoughts of the hardware to buy at the computer fair are:

Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L or MSI G31M

E5200 or E6300

2GB Kingston DDR2 800

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB HDD

Generic Case

non-generic 350/400ish watt PSU

DVDRW

Of course I can be convinced on other things like doesn't matter if I use Seagate/WD/Samsung.

I suppose I'm willing to consider a non-generic case but I'm still trying to be cheap.

I'm not quite sure on what PSU to get because I'm not sure what PSUs are in the 350-400ish watt range perhaps Antec Earthwatts?

I am willing to consider AMD although I'm pretty unfamiliar with AMD cause the only AMD box I have is an AMDK6-2 350Mhz

I doubt anything is going to happen with this before December either.

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Your proposal looks good, especially if you put Xp on it, not Vista.

Amd has all my sympathy as an outsider but their offer is less fun right now, let's hope they improve it. You will find competitors to the Core2, maybe at a similar price, but not at the same power consumption - this translates to cooling noise and electricity bill.

With Xp, you may even consider an Atom mobo for desktop. 80-120€ mobo+processor. About 3 times as fast as you PIII 800MHz. But be very careful with the expansion capabilities!

I have the 7200.12 500GB. No worries, very silent, high throughput. Maybe Hitachi's 7k1000b has a more agile arm, but I'm not sure.

-----

The existing Pc would be very comfortable with Win Me, especially with a 7200rpm hdd.

Edited by pointertovoid
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I doubt I'd find an atom mobo at the computer fair.

I wasn't ever considering vista, theres the potential I might change it to 7 once XP starts really dieing as it reaches end of life, but XP for now since the P3 has a retail license of XP Pro which I can use.

The P3 used to have 98SE on it and it was fine, it ran NT4 alright as well, Ill probably install 2000 on it afterward.

If the earthwatts 430w is not at the computer fair what else would you recommend, I'm pretty sure I've seen an earthwatts but I'm just making sure in case its not

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What kinds of things do your parents use the PC for? Are they just browsing the web and sending e-mails? Do they even need a DVD-RW? If the motherboard can handle more RAM then upgrading from 320MB would be a huge improvement. Any why do they have 320 MB to begin with? Is it a 256 MB chip combined with a 64 MB chip?

I was in a similar situation not too long ago. All my parents use the PC for is e-mail and web browsing, but they told me it was running really slow. My dad's friends send him all kind of e-mail with large attachments and the HDD was practically full. I set him up with a Yahoo e-mail account, forwarded the stuff he wanted to keep, reformatted and reclaimed 75% of the HDD space and it's back to running at a speed that's fine for their needs.

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I'd be more worried about the age of the hardware in the "old" system rather than the specs, honestly. What the OP has spec'ed out will be more than adequate for his parents' needs if the old Compaq was serving their needs.

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What kinds of things do your parents use the PC for?

IE7 (Its actually obvious that this runs slow), Outlook Express 6, Word 2000, Lotus 123, Delphi 4, Visio 2000

So they don't do anything particularly heavy.

Do they even need a DVD-RW?

A DVDRW would be to back up their data because the data uncompressed doesn't fit on a CD anymore and besides if you decide you want to upgrade to office 2007 or something its much more convenient to use the dvdrw in that pc then installing over the network.

If the motherboard can handle more RAM then upgrading from 320MB would be a huge improvement. Any why do they have 320 MB to begin with? Is it a 256 MB chip combined with a 64 MB chip?

Yeah its a 256MB and 64MB stick, as much as I could replace the 64MB stick with a 256MB stick, SDRAM isn't cheap anymore.

cluberti is right that disk is getting old and probably would be better to trust something newer

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I would change just a few things:

Motherboard: GA-G41M-ES2L, no Gbit network but it does have an updated GPU (Not that you will see much about that), the G31 is getting close to "End of Life". It also features a faster GPU core (up to 800MHz), OpenGL 2.1 and DX10 (I know, not much use with XP ;)).

CPU: E3200, 45nm also, just as good in many cases as the more expensive E5200 or E6300 (A whole 10 to 30USD... but it's something).

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The specs say it has Gbit network, it seems pretty similar to the G31 board so its probably a good choice if I see it.

I think I prefer the E5200/E6300 over E3200 but maybe only cause E3200 is a Celeron, but i suppose Celerons aren't as bad as they used to be.

Faster GPU core is nice, I have played with GMA3100 before.

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I think I prefer the E5200/E6300 over E3200 but maybe only cause E3200 is a Celeron, but i suppose Celerons aren't as bad as they used to be.
It's just marketing mostly, in this case the core is based on the same design and on 45nm, the only big diference you will find between them is the cache; Celeron 1MB, Pentium 2GB and the FSB. Now, the realword performance between those isn't big unless you go to higher CPU speeds, let's say above 4GHz, in that case the memory and chipset will let you down.

SLGU9	2.80 GHz	E6300	2	1066 MHz	45 nm	R0	2 MB	LGA775	06
SLxxx 2.60 GHz E5300 2 800 MHz 45 nm R0 2 MB LGA775 06
SLAY7 2.50 GHz E5200 2 800 MHz 45 nm M0 2 MB LGA775 06
SLB9T 2.50 GHz E5200 2 800 MHz 45 nm R0 2 MB LGA775 06
SLB7N 2.20 GHz E2210 2 800 MHz 45 nm M0 1 MB LGA775 06
SLGU5 2.40 GHz E3200 2 800 MHz 45 nm R0 1 MB LGA775 06

Note that the E2210 is also named as a Pentium while it has 1MB Cache.

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the only big diference you will find between them is the cache

That is the most apparent one perhaps. The 100MHz clock difference shouldn't really be noticeable (4% difference). FSB wise, it makes no real difference unless its BW starved (and it's not). That leaves the cache difference, which will have a varying effect depending on what one does, but then again, if you look at passmark scores, the E3200 gets 1458 and the E5200 gets 1329 (yes, lower!) so it can't be much slower (again, depending on your workload).

The main difference for me, and what makes that I'd sooner buy a E3200 over a E5200 even if they were the same price, is that the E3200 has VT. That means you can run x64 guest OS'es under vmware/vpc/virtualbox and others, as well as use Win7's XP compatibility mode, none of which won't work with the pricier E5200.

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oh I didn't realise that the E3200 has VT, because that was why I was thinking of E6300 because it has VT.

Afterall it is possible to goto x64 eventually although by then buying DDR2 would be way too expensive.

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SLGTL	2.6 GHz	E5300	2	800 MHz	45 nm	R0	2 MB	LGA775	06

That one also has VT, but there are 2 other E5300 models that don't have them, E5300 is about the price of the E5200 but still I would make sure you pick the right part number ;).

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