Need advice on PC

Could you advise me? A friend of mine has a computer in his study that he uses for invoicing for his plumbing business. He uses a simple account-keeping package that prints out invoices on 2 part carbonless paper on an Epson LQ 500 dot matrix printer. He has asked of my help for advice about improving the performance of his computer. He feels he may need to upgrade so that he can run some of the new software that he hears people talking about. He wants to keep his existing system intact and improve by the addition of parts only if possible thereby reducing the financial outlay.

This is what I found:

Eternally it has a slimline desktop case with a 14” SVGA monitor, standard 5 pin 104 key keyboard, 2 button serial mouse and non-amplified speakers. There is a single 3.5” floppy disk and a CD ROM of unknown specifications.

Upon opening the case I identified the components as:

· Computer case.
The case has caused me some concern, as it was not a simple matter to open the lid. Once inside I found that there are 2 * 3.5” bays. Installed in these are 1 hard disk, 1 floppy disk and 1 CD ROM. The power supply has 2 spare connectors and is a 250watt supply.

· Main board
The motherboard is quite old (4+ years) and has a Pentium 120cpu installed. There are 4* 72 pin RAM slots, 2 holding 8Mb sticks of ram and 2 more holding 4Mb ram each. There is one 168-pin ram slot, which is unused. There are 3 * 16 bit ISA slots housing a Banksia modem that I suspect to be a 28.8 kbs modem and a 16 bit genuine sound blaster sound card with a cable attached to the 40 pin proprietary connector leading to the CD ROM. There are also 4 * PCI slots one of which has a 2Mb Trident video card and another in use by a small card (SCSI) that allows connection from a digital camera. On close examination I found that the BIOS is not flash upgradeable.

· Hard drive & floppy drive
Whilst investigating the system from the CMOS I found that the hard disk is a Western Digital 1.6Gb hard disk installed using LBA mode and the floppy drive is a 1.44Mb. I also noticed a 100Mb Zip drive sitting on the shelf but not connected to the system.

· Sound card & CD ROM
The CD ROM is a creative 2-speed model CR-563-B that will only work if it is connected to the creative sound card. The sound card is a genuine creative labs but was designed for DOS application. There are many lines in the config.sys and autoexec.bat referring to the sound and CD ROM.

Could you please give me some advice on what I should do I really need a second opinion, it would be most appreciated

Thanks Gala email: chromeblue@hotmail.com

Personally I do not think it is worth upgrading because it will be expensive and time consuming.
You seem to be knowledgable with computer hardware. Have you suggested to your friend about building a new computer?
You could build your friend a good office computer for $500. Add another $150 for a good 17" monitor.
Software is your choice and will be the most expensive. MS has a vise grip hold on the software end. WinME and Works probably run you $250.

<font color=red>I go cuckoo for Coco Puffs!</font color=red>

There's a big difference between the VX and the TX, the TX could use STANDARD DIMMS but the VX was limmited to 2MB/chip (that's 32MB on a 16-chip double-sided DIMM in case your math lazy). It is also possible that it may be an ALi board. In any case, the VX would eliminate CHEAP RAM upgrades while the others allow him to take advantage of cheap PC133.
And DUAL VOLTAGE would allow him to use an AMD K6-2 400! So there is a lot more to figuring out a board than what you assume. Furthermore, IF it is NOT dual voltage, he is limmited to the expensive 200MHz single voltage processor, or overdrives.

Back to you Tom...