A friend of mine has a 4 year old P4 1.7 pc with a budget SiS 32MB graphics card, 256MB of Ram and a 20GB! HDD. This sytem is running WinXP Pro. This system is mainly used for Internet browsing and for viewing digital images taken from his camera. He is feeling that this sytem is very slow and wants it a bit faster, but he is on a tight budget! I suggested a 512Mb of Ram upgrade and a 128Mb Abit Ge Force FX5200 DDR VGA Card which both dont cost more than US $140 from a local store. What do you think? Will these mods help the PC go a bit faster? Any other suggestions?
The RAM is probably the biggest issue here. For what he's doing, the video card may not be necessary, unless he's trying to work at a resolution above 1280x1024. You also need to know what type of memory he uses, as you could have RDRAM (which would be in dual-channel), SDR SDRAM or DDR SDRAM. A faster hard drive could help too, but the easiest way to speed things up would be more RAM. Then a faster hard drive, followed by the video card.
I got your point. So do you think it will be better to buy a faster HDD instead of the vga card? Will 512 Ram be sufficient?
With XP, 512MB should be standard any more now. Photo editing is more on the memory, CPU, and hard drive access. Above 512MB, it depends on the person and what they're doing. Personally, I've tried above 512MB on my systems and didn't see a difference. What I can say I've noticed the most is a faster hard drive. With the IDE fire sales going on, it's pretty easy to get a good deal on a 7200RPM drive with an 8MB cache. You'll probably need to reinstall Windows on the new hard drive, and even if you can move the OS over, it's not going to hurt your performance to do a reinstall of Windows. One thing to keep in mind is that any hard drive larger than 137GB won't be totally available due to address limitations and the OS. However, if you have at least Service Pack 1 for XP, you should be okay. The only reason to get rid of SiS video card would be if you're having trouble with the drivers. Personally, I wouldn't use an SiS video chip, but it's more because of the performance than anything else. I'd only use it on my file server if I did, but that's because I don't need it for anything other than display purposes. If your buddy wants to do some gaming, then you'd want to look at the video card.
