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

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

It depends on your budget, what you want to use it for and how long you want your upgrade to last. You could probably just tweak what you have and get more time out of it, though it'll continue getting creakier. Or you could get a new motherboard, processor and RAM for between £100 and £200 that'll do for a few years. Example bundles here. RAM is stupidly cheap, so you could increase that more if you felt like it.

I've been running Windows 7 beta for quite some time now on one of my computers and I like it a lot. Microsoft have now made available the Release Candidate for free, which you should be able to use until they finally release it commercially. Feel fee to drop by and have a poke about on it and see what you think. As Vista is universally loathed, I expect 7 to take off quite quickly.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I'm of the opinion that chucking more RAM in is easiest, as I'm a bit clueless when it comes to the motherboard etc. Would that entail reinstalling anything, or is it just a case of slotting one out and slotting the new one in?

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

More RAM is certainly the easiest option, as the OS will just see more memory and use it. To check what's best to put in, go to crucial.com and use their memory advisor. If you want to check on the specific components you machine has, I'd suggest using the belarc advisor:
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

If you ever do get round to doing a big upgrade, I can take you through putting in a new motherboard. It's a very simple task, but it's still sensible to have support the first time you do it.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Apparently I've got an emtpy slot (fnarr fnarr), currently got a couple of 512MB sticks in. I can double one of those and fill the third slot too...

Cheers for the advice.

In fact, I'm just looking at RAM updates, and the 1GB modules all seem to be 333MHz. Does this matter? I don't remember the 512MB running at this speed! I'm not convinced it does, just needing to be sure before I spend owt :)