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

[409.livejournal.com]

Put as much RAM into the machine as it can handle (it'll cost you bugger all). There are other upgrades you can do without having to reinstall windows (depending what hardware you are running, e.g. graphics card onboard motherboard or separate). If you are willing to ghost your boot drive (the one with windows) you'll see a decent performance increase by ghosting onto a modern speedy HD - this is not the easiest thing in the world to do but is always my second suggestion after RAM.

Windows would also benefit from a damn good clean out - registry, random crap loading on startup and running in the background, etc. Also defrag your hard disks (this can help quite a bit if you've not done it in a while).

Ignore Vista (dear god but it's horrible). I have no experience of Ubuntu other than helping people who can't get hardware working.

If you want to play games then buy an XBox 360 (better, cheaper (by a large amount)).

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Defragging, deep cleaning and start-up stuff is pretty efficient. I'll boost the RAM, not too worried about trying more technical solutions!

[409.livejournal.com]

If you play Civ4 then a bigger graphics card wouldn't hurt...

Assuming you have an older AGP motherboard then either of these are ok:
http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=14513&category_id=126&manufacturer_id=0&tid=zt-62aa250-hss
(£36)
or

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=21140&category_id=125&manufacturer_id=0&tid=11124-00-20r
(£85)
i'll give you three guesses as to which is better :)