CPU upgrading question

[basfengineer]

howdy
my question is that if I upgrade my current system:
P2 266Mhz
64MB RAM
6.4GB 5400RPM HD
to:
P2 266Mhz
256MB RAM
40GB 7200RPM HD

will that cause a "bottleneck" because of the CPU? And if so, will a P2 450Mhz eliminate the bottleneck? I primarily use the computer for managing my financial accounts, surfing the web, emailing, and IMing.

ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED!!

 

[kursplat]

well..... yes going to a 450 will help alot with the other upgrades.sounds like for what your doing , it's plenty fast. you'll really notice it with the 7200 drive.

ya the 450 will still be a "bottle neck" but you get rid of that one and it's somthing else....
good luck

 

[BA]

Be sure you could use the 450. Most likely, a 266 would be on an FX or LX chipset mobo, which only have a 66mHz FSB. The 450 uses a 100mHz FSB, and would not work.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Taking into account your light duty computer usage, I would suggest just adding the 256mb of ram. Doing so will most likely completely eliminate the necessity for using your hard drive's swap file (based upon your usage) and give you a satifactory performance increase without investing in a new hard drive and ATA100 controller card.

 

[PerfectFit]

What made you decide to upgrade in the first place? That's what you should deal with first - for instance if you're out of HDD space, then add capacity (and move up to 7200rpm, the cost difference vs. 5400 is minimal). If you notice frequent disk accesses (swap file) while running your financial software, then add memory. Etc.

If you are going to upgrade the processor, critical factor is FSB speed (which will require a new mobo). If you are going to do that, then why go from 66 to 100 MHz - unless you have access to free "recycled" parts. You wuld be better off moving to 133FSB.

Do you have a "high-speed" (DSL or cable) Internet connection? If not, that will give you the greatest performance improvement for what you use the computer for - rather than tweaking the hardware.

 

[QTPie]

if you're not a heavy 3D gamer or software developer, your system should be doing fine with 256MB RAM. Adding RAM will increase the performance significantly. Also, don't forget to delete temp files as well as temporary internet files and defrag your HDD frequently (every 2 weeks)
Applied all the patches.

In my experience, win2k seems to be very stable and best performance.

 

[Tominator]

Get a Celeron 466,500 or 533 and a slotket.

Can you post the brand and model of the motherboard?