Am I wasting my money?

[Houma48]

Would I be wasting my money to upgrade my Dell XPS T(500)1.4 PowerLeap Celeron with a better video card? My present video card is a GForce Ti4200 8x. If I should upgrade what should I upgrade it to?
Thanks!
Matt

 

[RichPLS]

To put is gently, <b>YES!</b>

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[cleeve]

You need a better process (hell, whole platform) before you should start worrying about a new videocard.

Your Ti4200 already overpowers the rest of your rig.

________________
<b>Radeon <font color=red>9700 PRO</b></font color=red> <i>(o/c 332/345)</i>
<b>AthlonXP <font color=red>3200+</b></font color=red> <i>(Barton 2500+ o/c 400 FSB)</i>
<b>3dMark03: <font color=red>5,354</b>

 

[Nitrom]

DELL makes highly proprietary computers...and they are so incredibly propietary that U can only upgrade buying from DELL(except for video card, sound card and optical drives).

Second problem: depending what DELL model U have...U may upgrade the processor but U may nopt upgrade the motherboard and much less upgrade the BIOS...cuz DELL will not let you do it.

I talk by personal experience.A very sad one...where even the processor (a Pentium 4 1.4 gigz. was propietary and made specially for DELL).Even the HD was propietary (made by WD).

Conclusion: use the DELL until it drops...DO NOT upgrade your DELL...is a waste of money. In the future...build yourself a computer or buy one whose components are upgreadable and swapable.

I don't think that a Celeron based system will give you too much room to the kind of upgrades you want to make anyways...

 

[RichPLS]

The motherboard issue is that you need to change the back plate to fit board in case, but can be done.
You have to get an adapter to attach power to board. But if you change out board, the Dell supplied O/S will not install on it due to not having Dell bios installed.
Memory, processor, hard drives, DVD/CD ROMS and graphic cards are standard and can be upgraded easily.

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[dhlucke]

My old Dell Win98 OS installed just fine on other systems. The problem was the proprietary parts, not the software.

My advice is the same as above, run the machine into the ground and then build or buy a new one that doesn't have proprietary parts.

<pre><font color=red>A64 3200+ Winchester
DFI Lan Party NF4 Ultra-D
1GB Corsair 4400C25PT
WD740GD, WD2000JB, WD1200JB
ATI X800XL
Dell 2405FPW</pre><p>