Hey a friend of mine was running an ancient eMachine T2682 with 256 mb of RAM and a 2.6 Ghz celeron. The processor died in it and she needs her computer for school. She says she can't spend more than $100, yeah I know, and so I was wondering if this will give a noticeable performance boost over just buying another celeron and dropping that in it:
Add a cheap 1GB stick of DDR2 and it should run XP much better right? I also have 2 512mb sticks of DDR-3200 RAM to put into it if I get another celeron, so I need to know if the Atom 330 and the GMA 950 will give a noticeable performance boost.
Is that one of those ITX system's with the CPU soldered on? The Atom 330 should be good for web browsing and editing documents, I don't really know if you mgiht get a performance gain though. I have a Dell with a 2.53Ghz Celeron D and its pretty slow even with 2GB DDR-3200 RAM.
IMO I'd never get a ITX motherboard and a Atom CPU, just to slow I used to have a Dell mini with a Atom CPU and it was pretty slow when playing music files and browsing sites like Youtube. Editing documents was fine but the screen was too small, lol.
Message edited by AKM880 on 07-23-2009 at 06:03:28 AM
$100 as a maximum budget is extremely limiting.However there are several options.
If you're sure that it's just the CPU that has fried you could perhaps just replace the CPU perhaps with a similar one from a PC salvage type store for under $20.If it works, 256 mb RAM is also extremely limiting and you could upgrade the system with a 1 gigabyte stick of PC2100 RAM.
Another option would be to buy a used PC from classified ads or perhaps craigslist would be best.You could get an older Pentium 4/Celeron or Athlon 64 system for around $50.Sometimes the original owner will even leave the operating system on it and/or include the restore disks/Windows XP.
pls like a 400fsb Northwood crippled core celeron. You should be able to upgrade to a P4 with a 400fsb or 533fsb according to Intel. You will not be able to use a 800fsb cpu.
Xhasing an old faster cpu second hand might be cheap ... sticking more ram (to 1Gb might also push it along a bit ... definate big improvement going from 256 to 512.