Upgrading my parents old PC
 

I'm thinking about upgrading my parents old pc. It is a HP xt858 from 2001. It has a 1 Ghz Pentium 3, 192 megabytes of PC-133 SDRAM, a 60 gigabyte hard drive, 8x cd burner, and Windows Millennium Edition. It runs terribly slow right now, mainly because in the 6+ years they have owned it they have never reinstalled the OS. I do virus and spyware scans on it and other than some cookies it always comes up clean, they don't visit bad sites and they do have firewall software installed. I know reinstalling the OS would help a ton, but I don't want to install ME on there, since it was junk to begin with and now that it is unsupported, well its not worthwhile.
Here are some of the upgrades I am thinking of. Would this be worthwhile? Keep in mind all my parents use it for is web browsing, Word and Excel, and Solitaire. They don't do any gaming or video or music encoding or anything else that is very processor intensive.

2 sticks of this memory
This hard drive
A copy of Windows XP
and up to date internet security software

The total upgrade is about $235. Anyhting else I'm missing? Or any better suggestions are welcome.

The RAM is gonna make the PC run like a dream. A Windows XP reinstall and the RAM is really all you need. I'd ditch the security software that you listed and just put AVG Antivirus on their PC along with Ad-Aware 2007.

I think you're gonna be surprised at how well it runs with that RAM!

You can go here: http://www.dell.com/content/products...en&s=dfh&cs=22

and find a whole new computer at around the same price point that you were looking to spend originally. IMHO it isn't even worth updating a computer that old.

Definitely worth a look at when you can get a refurbished system with 1 GB of ram for $299.

I'd buy another one, refurb or even a used machine than go thru the hassle.

I agree with the others. It'd be a better deal spending around the same amount of money to get a new, used, or refurbished machine.

I don't think XP would run *that* well on a P3 1Ghz. I'd vote for a newer processor (i.e. new/refurbished box).

The processor would be fine. You can't dell a difference between a 600 MHz processor and a 3 GHz processor when running XP. The major contributor to performance in XP is how much ram you have. Put 1 GB of ram in a 500 MHz PC and 1 GB in a 3 GHz PC and they'll be indistinguishable in just about everything but gaming.

I guess since I have switched over to Linux exclusively since February and have had no issues I could just use my copy of XP on their computer. That along with Lasereth's suggestion of AVG and Ad-Aware, would just mean the cost of the hardware upgrade which would be right at $100. The main reason for the new hard drive is that I'm pretty sure the one in there now is a 5400 rpm drive, and two, it is really noisy, one of the noisier drives I've heard just spinning, and the loudest drive I've ever heard when seeking. A new one would be quieter and faster.

And yes I do realize it is a bit pointless to look for ways to upgrade this pc as opposed to buying a refurbished or off lease pc. If I had the money, or if my folks had the money to spare believe me I would just get a new one. But sometimes you just have to make do with what you have.

I side with Lasereth and would go with the RAM and OS upgrade. A 60GB hard drive should be sufficient for their intended use. If they start to fill that up, removable drives and a good way to archive data.

My only tip, make sure you have all of the proper drivers before wiping the OS.

edit: You were posting about the drive noise as I was posting, so go ahead and upgrade the drive. Noisy drives suck:grumpy:

Besides the sound, I'd also go with the MTBF for the drive is probably sooner than later since the drive is already 6 years old.