?ld pc worthwhile upgrades

[dcmax]

i have aquired free an old pc that seems to be running at 1.1mhz on a celeron processor inside are 3 pci slots one with a modem on and one with a 128mb vid card. it also has 512mb of ram installed.

being totally computer illiterate but also noting it seems to perform reasonably well im just wondering as a cheap upgrade whats the fastes processor i can add to this machine and is it difficult to do.

[query]

There isn't much room to upgrade a 1.1 GHz Celeron - 1.4 is as fast as that type of chip was produced.

[dcmax]

so if i added more ram and a better vid card would i get any worthwhile benefits

[query]

If you have  VIA chipset, you may be able to add RAM - however, going beyond 512 MBytes does nothing for DOS (95/98/ME) and won't do much for desktop use of 2000/XP, except with certain applications like large databases, spreadsheets, video/photo editing.

If you have an Intel chipset, 512 MBytes is the limit for most PIII/Celeron boards -- the chipsets in the 8xx series max out there.

A new video card may help - but check carefully -- if this is a brand-name system, chances are there is no AGP slot - most Celerons were sold without them.

[dcmax]

no just pci so i take it i cant go higher than 128 on a pci slot

[query]

The RAM on the video card and the RAM in the system are two different issues -- it is true that most PCI cards will be 128 MBytes or less, since they are not geared at the enthusiast/performance market.

[Whizbang]

Definitely not junk material though.  That machine is quite capable of word processing, photo-editing, scholar work.  With a 1.1g processor, you would not find much performance improvement anyway, even if you could upgrade, since most speed requirements are relegated to hyper-fast gaming and simply bragging rights.  The three PCI slots is a bummer, but an external modem would free up one.  Sound card and video card would take two more leaving one for networking or port additions.  The situation is restrictive, but who can complain about a working fairly fast freebie. ;)

[Carskick]

The amount of VRAM on a video card is not everything. Basicly, the faster a video card chipset, the more VRAM is needed for optimal running. Anymore will barely effect performance. 128mb of VRAM is enough for any current day video chipset. What type of 128mb video card to you have on that computer? If it has 128mb, it's probably got a fast enough chipset to be a good enough video card for a 1.1 ghz celeron CPU computer. the best PCI video card I can think of is the FX 5200 PCI card. ATI may have a similar one too, maybe a 9000 or 9200 series, but they probably wouldn't give much of a system performance boost compared to the current card, even for gaming.