What to upgrade/upgrade to...

[MartyMcFly3]

Hey everyone.

My parents computer (Compaq 6027 US) has a Compaq 07E8h motherboard with an Intel Pentium 4 2.00 GHz processor. Their computer is slow as hell. I want to make it faster for them, but dont know whether to upgrade just the processor (if the motherboard can handle it or not) or both the motherboard and the processor.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mwmorph]

rest of the specs?how is it slow for?games? websurfing?
did yuo check for viruses/spyware?
btw, it could use 512mb more ram.

 

[suicidalpigeon]

and are you willing to have to reinstall xp if you were to get a whole new setup?

 

[MartyMcFly3]

Originally posted by: mwmorph
rest of the specs?how is it slow for?games? websurfing?
did yuo check for viruses/spyware?
btw, it could use 512mb more ram.

Booting up the computer itself takes about 10 minutes. Overall performance wise, trying to open anything takes forever.

There are no viruses/spyware.

760 MB RAM
80 GB Hard Drive

Waffles - Yes they are willing to reinstall Windows XP if they must.

Dont know what else you really want specs-wise. Have to run for a bit. Thanks for the help so far guys.

 

[mwmorph]

well, then it's probably because of your virus scanning suite. my AMD64 2.4ghz system took 5 minutes from the log in screen to finish booting xp with mcafee internet security suite 2005. without it , it was like 1 minute. also, is yuor hdd 4.2,5.4 or 7.2k rpm?

 

[dderolph]

You don't need to upgrade hardware. That computer should perform fine for what I would guess it's used for. You need to figure what the heck is making it so slow. 10 minutes to bootup obviously indicates something is wrong. It should probably take no longer than 2 minutes, even with a slower hard drive (5400 RPM). If it has a 7200 RPM drive, it should probably be booting up in 1 1/2 minutes or less.

You say no spyware/virus issues? How about giving some detail to support that statement? What software is installed on that computer to deal with spyware and viruses?

How many processes are running after a fresh startup? Have you reviewed them to see whether some of them could be disabled or eliminated? If you have an Internet security suite such as mcafee internet security suite 2005 or equivalent, have you tried disabling it and then checking startup time?

How full is the hard drive? How long since Disk Cleanup has been run? What about disk defragmentation?

You might try a tool such as CCleaner to clean some clutter out of the Registry and other parts of the system.

 

[Slowlearner]

That PC is more than adequate for normal home use. It needs the monthly maintenance - Windows update, AV update and full scan, Spybot/Adaware/Housecall scans (most important), maybe even a XP reinstall, and definitely removing any unneccesary startup items, I use startup.exe from www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml.

Upgrading any of the components is not going to help if the OS is messed up, drivers corrupt or there are many programs being loaded at startup.

 

[IconK7]

No question, that setup should run just fine for all everyday tasks. If you can't find what's slowing down the system, then re-format & re-install windows before even thinking about spending money for a hardware upgrade.

 

[MartyMcFly3]

Alright, I will monkey around with their computer a bit tomorrow to try and figure out what is making it slow. Thanks for the help everyone.