A good friend of mine is looking to upgrade his machine. His budget is $200. He is currently running a 2.8 ghz pentium 4 with 512mb of DDR RAM. He asked me for advice as to what upgrades he should make to improve the performance enough so that he can make it through his last 2 years of college. I recommended that he upgrade his RAM to 2 Gig. My question is, would it be beneficial for him to purchase a low end dedicated graphics card? He mainly uses his PC for browsing the internet/IM, writing papers, and burning music. He does not play computer games. If this plan does not seem smart, then what would be the best upgrades to make for under $200? I appreciate any advice/ comments.

adding another 512 would smooth it out if he has xp, but no the graphics card would not help if he is not gaming.

go out and grab a 1GB stick of DDR. should cost $40 at most. for your friend's needs, dual channel won't do much so just buy the chepest ram you can find.

Oh I forgot to ask, Would a gigabyte Ethernet card help out? Im not sure what his network is like at school but I know that some people at my school needed to take upgrade to a gigabit card in order to take full advantage of the internet speeds Sorry for the double post

So the best investment of his money would be to put 1GB of RAM in his PC. Would it be worth it to spend the extra money and get 2 GB? DDR is pretty cheap and if it is even a slight performance increase over the 1 GB then it would be worth it.

He is satisfied with the amount of HD space he has so I dont think a second HD would be an option. He currently is running 512mb of DDR and he has a built in Ethernet port on his mobo. But I know it is not 100mb/s capable. Like other memebers have recommended, I thiink a RAM upgrad would give him a good performance increase for his budget. Would it be best to purchase a 1GB DIMM and replace his 512 DIMM with it? Or just purchase a 512 DIMM and add it to his current 512 DIMM?