Upgrade old system?

[south_valhalla]

Hi Forum people,

I have a very old system that I want to leave for my Mom so that we can Skype when I'm overseas. I've just done a clean install of XP and the system seems to be a bit sluggish. My question is would replacing the old RAM and installing a 1gig DDR400 RAM chip show a vast improvement on system speed? The mobo only supports up to DDR333 but I understand that if the voltage of the new RAM is the same (which it is) then it will work fine.

Specs:

Gigabyte GA 7VAX MB
AMD 1700+ CPU
1 x DDR 266 256mb RAM
1 x DDR 233 256mb RAM
20 Gig Seagate Barracuda IDE HDD
Winfast A430 128mb Graphics Card
Windows XP SP3

Thanks!

 

[GhislainG]

It will only help a bit. Windows XP runs fine on a 512MB system that's powerful enough. Installing a faster video card and hard disk might be a better investment. I wouldn't spend more than $50 to improve it.

 

[south_valhalla]

It will only help a bit. Windows XP runs fine on a 512MB system that's powerful enough. Installing a faster video card and hard disk might be a better investment. I wouldn't spend more than $50 to improve it.

Hardware is pretty expensive where I live and 1Gig RAM stick comes pretty close to $50 ($42) so I definitely wont find a HDD or video card to speed it up. Its pretty much RAM or nothing. So, not worth it a all?

 

[GhislainG]

Certainly not worth $42 simply because the performance improvement will be minimal.