Paging computeristi

Not really, P4s aren't that much faster at lower clock speeds so I doubt that it's that noticeable.

Not bad for fifty quid tho'.

Photoshop is a memory hog so you may want to chuck more memory at it. Firefox's speed is mainly governed by you connection speed anyway so that's not going to make a major difference...

Horse pish. A Duron is basically a council issue Celeron. Stick another 256 or even 512 in with the existing memory and a 1.8 P4 is still a perfectly capable chip.

I'd say so.

Amen. 1GB memory is a must these days. I'm running 2GB at home with Vista and it's 'brisk'. No mean machine either, though.

I agree. P4s are still perfectly useable, Durons are just a bit toss heh.

Well, yes, cos it's only £50 and it'll probably be twice as quick as what you have now (although it will need upping to 1gb of RAM). You could just spend like, £200 though and get something that wasn't infuriatingly slow heh ;-)

I reckon 2gb is the minimum these days hehe :-)

You'd think so, but I've just gotten up and the PC manages to hit 100% cpu usage fairly easily. I suspect it's down to XP being clogged up after a year or two of being installed, but TBH it's a fuckload easier to install XP on a clean machine than to organise all my s**te, make a seperate windows partition and format that. WTF does windows take so long to move and copy files FFS?

What sort of speed is worth having? I assume a 2.8 would be considerably quicker, but what's a decent price for one?

I'd agree, but when I've got 40 or so tabs open, it all seems to grind to a halt. Do P4s take funny memory BTW? I don't want to end up spending huge sums on a £50 box to end up with something usable.

Yes P4's can take some crappy memory, don't even bother with the 50 quid machine, get onto ebuyer and get a semperon, half gig of ram and a mobo , cost you 100 quid and your good to go

Stick with AMD, and you wont have to worry about RDRAM or pairing memory etc....

Wasting 50 quid on a PC that is marginally better then the one you got seems outrageous, but then if your budget is tight (it seems so) then try and look for a half decent AMD XP chip mobo combo 2nd hand on ebay, I just chiucked out 2 x 1800XP chips as they are worth bugger all now.

Can't belive your still running a duron :) fair play hehe

Do you like old Italian cars?

No but I like the way AMD has stuck to the same architecture since day one, this has meant all memory worked in all pc's, and why AMD always get my money,

I preferred the way my P4 was still working, long after the Athlon's overheated. Not that I'm saying the Athlon isn't value for money, though.

TBH I'd much rather have another machine. That'd allow me to give this to my Dad, use his as a leechbox at home, and have a fast machine here. Then I could make use of his fast internet connection... And a full machine is generally going to mean a Pentium if I'm not going to buy something someone's put together themselves...

Benn building PC's since 1991, always used AMD never had 1 overheat, only CPU I ever had overheat was old CYRIX and that was due to the fan packing up.

Only time a AMD will overheat is if you overclock it, certain cores handle OCing better, but I have never OC'd a system so know nothing of overheats.

If you type into google AMD overheat and intel overheat, you will get the same results, actually lol you get 727k for intel 460k for AMD :)

Handing down a Duron is like handing down a pair of worn pants :) com'n mate get your hand in your wallet and spend 100 quid.

I've overheated an AMD duron, and that wasn't overclocked. Didn't do permanent damage, but it did stop the computer a few times. Then I cleaned out the crap from the heatsink...

cheers, clive

My money would go on the P4 box and a few quid on an upgrade to at least a gig of RAM for the running of XP.

Durons were what pikey AMD users bought when they were strapped for cash.

Well, he's using the aforementioned Celeron 333A at the minute, so he might not think so. It'll just about cope with the odd bit of ebaying and typing, but really it's a bit of a pain in the arse.

Interesting, I have a 1.3 Athlon with 320mb memory and a 1.8 P4 with

256mb, same OS Mandriva 2006 and the 1.3 Athlon is noticeably quicker in normal use. I want to get some more memory for the P4 and see what dfference that makes. I shall probably try an at least double the memory for what it will cost.

Running Ubuntu, a bit more ram makes a fair difference even to the Celeron

333. Think it's got 284 megs.

Yebbut, most OSs do that if you ask them to do some work...

Agreed.

Defragmented the disk any time recently?

I'd go 2.4-2.8 GiggleHurtz minimum as that's a more than decent step up from your box. Basic box should still come in way under 100 quid depending on what you get.

No, it's standard memory. I'd try to get decent memory, though. I usually buy Crucial memory, was very problem free for me so far and the only time one stick went wrong it was swapped out in a matter of days even though I had lost the receipt.

I'm still running my 1.3 duron too. With 1/2gig ram on XP. Slow but useable. My motherboard might take a 3.0 Socket A Barton if I can find one and the correct bios. But it would be cheaper to replace the lot as I only have an AGP graphics slot and the GeForce 2 MX is now ancient.

What sort of memory will I be looking for? I'd like to get an idea of the sort of money I'd spending on RAM. Does it go in pairs these days DDR style or what?