LiveJournal excitement for a Monday

[cheekbones3]

It's that time again. My PC is getting a bit old and creaky, so I need to at least upgrade, and probably just get a new one.

I'm looking for advice therefore: I've currently got a 2GHz processor and 900MB of RAM, hard drive space is not an issue, I've got an external drive too.

Is it worth me upgrading what I've got at the moment, or should I just get something new and whizzy? I'm slightly concerned about the usual problems of transferring across all the stuff I've got running on this computer, and also because I'll be sticking with Windows, it seems like a bit of a limbo time to upgrade to Vista when it's supposedly crap and the new one's coming out later anyway.

Another thought, is it possible to port my current registered (!) Windoze XP to a new computer at all, possible via the external hard drive? I don't have the original disks, as I got this comp second hand.

I look forward to your tech consultancy pitches!

Comments

[andrewducker]

What sort of thing do you want your PC to do? If it's just web browsing, the occasional document, etc. then a 2GHz processor is fine.

The "getting old and creaky" would probably be mostly solved by upgrading the RAM to 2GB and reinstalling Windows from scratch.

Which contrasts somewhat with your lack of original disks. I'd recommend googling "tinyxp torrent", if I was the kind of person who'd do that kind of thing.

If you want to play games, of course, then your graphics card probably needs to be updated.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I shudder at spending an afternoon reinstalling Windows from a haxored torrent file, as tempting as it might be! I'm veering towards chucking in more RAM and just keeping on top of maintenance otherwise, and to hell with the occasional crashes. They appear to correlate with using Flash or playing Civ 4 (which pushes the comp quite a bit anyway), so I'm sure I can manage!

Actually, also ripping CDs does it, but that's possibly because Winamp has issues.