Some advice on an old DELL 3100

[Attila the Bun]

My brother has this as his home computer...not a problem as he only does emails and web surfing...however does have 20mb Virgin broadband which should be blasting through, but isn't.

Is it the pentium 4 that is bottlenecking the flow or the ethernet link.

If it is the cpu is there an easy update I can do or being intel will I have to change the mobo and processor.

[Skulltrail]

If you find out the specific model of P4 that would be helpful, as the P4 used 3 different sockets, of which only 775 has a readily available supply of replacements, but they probably woundn't be supported by the BIOS.

It may simply be the HDD can't cache quickly enough for the full 20mbits to be used.

Going up from (I presume) 512MB of RAM to 1GB may be helpful as well.

[Homeking]

Looking at the online manual here:

http://support.euro.dell.com/support...n/sm/index.htm

assuming I've got the right one it appears it's a socket 478 and is probably running a P4 with hyperthreading. Best way to find out is to stick CPUID on.

I have similar problems with a PC I use just for web browsing that I've built by using bits from alot of friend's old PCs that they were just going to throw away.

It currently contains a P4 3Ghz with hyperthreading so Windows sees 2 CPUs in there but the main bottleneck I have is that it only supports SATA1 so even with 1GB of RAM it can still be slow on the web.

Believe it or not you can still get 478 boards new and I thought about getting this one here:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/255174

which supports SATA2 and would have the added advantage of being able to overclock the P4 which I can't do now because the only board I have is an OEM Asus taken from an old HP media centre so the BIOS is locked.

Unfortunately by the time I added up a new board and hard drive I figured I may as well put the money towards a new system!

It might be worth browsing EBay and trying to find a cheap 478 board that supports SATA2 though as well as increasing the RAM up to 1GB if you have less than this.

[K3V]

try it in safemode see if any programs have been slowing it down, av/firewall etc.. or even try booting off a live disk and test,

don't forget a 20mbps vmedia line is only around 2.2mb/s max

[Attila the Bun]

Cheers Chaps,

Personally speaking I think I might build him a new one as a present for his birthday.

A smallform would be the just the ticket for him. I should get a spec from CtV.