Hey guys,
My Dad has been wanting a computer for a while to upload his photo's onto (or download, as he calls it -.-) and do some editing with the software that came with the camera, plus some basic internet browsing. However, we don't have the money to get him a computer to do this. He would either buy a laptop or use my mum's old one, as she is getting my nan's old one. But it is soooooo slow. It takes ~30 minutes to boot and open an email attatchment. It is painful. And, you can't really do photo editing on a touchpad?
Anyway, I have this old desktop PC. It's a Dell Dimension 8300. I'm not too certain on the specs, but I know it has a Pentium 4 (the one with hyper threading), 500MB of RAM, 120GB HDD, and a Radeon 9800 Pro (some generic specs are
here). My issue is the graphics card has gone kaput. It looks like this:
My question is, is it worth fixing this computer? Will it be powerful enough to do what he wants? If I was to restore it, I think I'd upgrade to 2GB RAM (4GB of 184-pin DDR is sooo expensive!) and get a new AGP x8 card (plus a bios battery as that is out of charge, but I have one already). This would all cost ~£70 looking at this
memory and
graphics. I may even contemplate an upgrade to Windows 7 (32 bit, ofc). Would the PC be able to handle all of this?
Otherwise, he would get my mum's laptop. It's a 1.73GHz centrino (same as in mine, to the left), 60GB HDD, 500MB RAM (DDR 100-pin, I would have to upgrade), and graphics I don't know. It's gut wrenchingly slow, but I guess a clean XP install would give it a slight boost.
Thanks very much