Upgrade a Dell (i know lol)

I

insaneshell

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2011
Messages
363
So I do PC work for folks via craigslist and this guy brought me a dell, now I wasnt in the PC field untill the AM2/Core2 days in 06 and never really messed with upgrading P4's. Right now its a 1.8A Northwood, board supports according to dell 400mhz bus Pentium4's. What kind of speed bump can this guy get as I don't like ripping people off going to say a P4 2.4 or 2.5 I've found these locally at a discount store for 47 and 53 respectivly they also have a 2.6 for 84 and a 2.8 for 119 which seems a tad pricey for something this old. He said its sluggish, it already has a gig of DDR 2100 inside so I know its not a memory bog down so we ruled that out. System is clean took care of that also so I want to know if its worth upgrading this Demension 2350 or not, aka I don't want to sell him something that offers barley any improvement
 
Things you can do:
1. Old P4's on the F/S section of the forum are cheap. Really cheap. 2.4GHz should help a little bit.
2. Get it to 2GB DDR.
3. Change the hard drive to a more modern unit, even if its another IDE unit. But I'd consider putting in a cheap IDE to SATA bridge or SATA card and getting him a modern SATA HDD. I think its slow because of the now nearly decade old HDD.

4. However, depending on what he does, I'd suggest a new machine.
 
HDD is modern did that for him last year right now has a Seagate 320gb 7200.10 IDE HD. As far as ram goes for what he used it for 1gb to 2gb wont make a diffrence this is Windows XP afterall and he checks email, facebook and watches DVD's. He just noticed with the newest flash its a little slow, but I have my data server box here with Flash 10 on an Athlon XP 2800 with 512mb of ram and flash is fine on my XP Pro SP3 install, so I know he doesnt need ram, but the choppiness is there, and he wants it to go away which we have narrowed it down to the CPU also offically the board supports a maximum of 1024mb of ram 512 per slot
 
I just upgraded an older laptop running xp from 1gb to 2gb's and it made a very noticeable difference across the board. I would give xp a good cleaning and add another gb of ram and be done.
 
does not support more than 512mb per slot not an option also i do alot of PC work all XP machines I sell have 1gb on them and never any complaints on preformance
 
Dell might say that, however the chipset might support more.
 
Build or buy a new computer, there isnt much that will make it no so sluggish.

Remove all the bloatware.
 
Imma guessing it might be a Dimension 2300/2350. Either one uses the 845GL chipset, which only supports up to 512MB DIMMs (p.16).

I usually like geeks.com for older processors, but they seem to be out of 400MHz FSB P4 chips. eBay is probably the next best bet. I see a couple of Northwood P4 2.5GHz 400MHz FSB chips for around $35 buy-it-now.
 
The Dimension 2350 uses a standard sized microATX board and mounting (and standard ATX 12v PSU), so it's possible to replace the motherboard if the client wants to. You'd have to separate the wires from the front panel harness to make it work with a new board, and the green shroud over the stock cooler would likely have to be removed.

Otherwise, it's just an old computer. A faster P4 and more memory while running XP should give it a speed boost, but it's never going to be a fast system. A PCI video card may help too since the system's memory is single channel and low bandwidth SDR. It's just hard to justify spending much money to upgrade such an old computer. A new $300 on sale desktop will run rings around that old thing.
 
no its DDR 2700 1gb of the stuff its a 2350 not a 2300 the 2300 has SD-Ram this is DDR

Also ive mentioned more than once that he could upgrade ive even got one here that would be great for him not new but for what he wants a great little PC

AMD Athlon X2 5000
ASUS M2N-SLI Nforce 570SLI
2gb DDR2 800
Windows XP Home SP3
Geforce 8600GT DDR2

It was brought in by a customer as a trade in for a newer rig, I have it for sale for 350 but he isnt interested lol
 
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