New PC or Not?14 Sep '07, 18:44![Computer Work - Installing a TV card into Kate's computer [© Ben Gamblin]](http://www.bengamblin.co.uk/images/image189.jpg "Computer Work - Installing a TV card into Kate's computer [© Ben Gamblin]")
I've been pondering about building another new PC over the last couple of days, but can't decide whether it's really worth it or not.I've currently got two machines running - a server machine (running as a web, email and file server) and a general use machine (doing day to day stuff). The server is running nicely at the moment since it's not that old, but my general machine is getting on in years. It's an old AMD Athlon 1700+ with a measly 256MB of RAM. It used to run using onboard sound and video (with shared RAM), but I added in a spare soundcard and bought a PCI video card (no AGP or PCI-E here) which helped it's performance a bit, and eliminated annoying squeeky noises from the speakers when scrolling. I've also added a new PSU which runs quieter and cooler than the original It still is quite sluggish though. Running any OS (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Windows), startup time is not great and applications take a while to load. And running 3 or 4 programs at once really starts to tax the system. Every now and again it will just restart of it's own accord. Now I have a couple of options. The first option is the cheapest. Buying a stick of 512MB SDRAM should stabilise the system somewhat. Based on eBuyer prices, that'll cost around £35. Even better would be 2 sticks to make it 1GB although I'll need to check the motherboard to ensure it will take that. Assuming it does though, it'll set me back £70 (2 x 512MB modules). I'd also like to add a USB2 card, but that would mean loosing the dedicated sound card since there's only 2 PCI slots. And whether or not I add that card, I'd like a front panel USB hub to take up a 3.5" drive bay. So let's say I upgrade with 512MB RAM, 1 USB2 PCI card and a USB2 internal hub, option 1 will cost around £50.00 The second option is a new machine. I intend to recycle the original case, power supply, sound card, hard drive and DVD burner so all that would be needed is a new motherboard, CPU, cooler, RAM, graphics card, and internal USB hub. As a temporary measure, I can use the PCI graphics card so I'll take that off the list. Now I need to consider what sort of processor. Ideally I'd like to future proof myself somewhat, so I was thinking of an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 2x2GHz CPU. Ideally I'd like 1GB of DDR RAM but will settle for 512MB for the time being. I'll also settle for the cooler supplied with the CPU, and no USB hub as temporary cost saving measures. So the cost of the new machine at this spec will be around £135.00 So for an extra £85.00 I can have a new machine. If I save the money and go for the upgrade, I could decide in a year that the aging AMD Athlon CPU simply doesn't cut it any more and get a new machine then. However I'd be stuck with outdated SDRAM with no use for it. The third option is to go for a new machine but settle for a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo E2160 chip. This will save around £25 from the cost of machine, but I'll also loose some L2 Cache as well as that slight speed drop. I haven't decided yet, but whilst typing this out, to me simply upgrading this ageing computer doesn't seem very effective. The option of a slightly slower CPU could be a winner, and in a few years time I should be able to upgrade the processor without dramatically changing hardware, if I decide it's necessary.
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