Totally OT: Value of my PC?

I'd give you £50 for it, but you're at t'other end of the country

I'll give you £50+shipping

Douglas

Cheers Doki + Douglas, it seems it's worth at least £50 then.

On one of the countless Dell leaflets I've seen recently, one deal that caught my eye was a P4 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR RAM, 160GB 7.2k rpm HDD, 17" Analogue flat panel Monitor and 16x DVD+/-RW Drive, for £569 including delivery and VAT, which is quite tempting, as bearing in mind if I'd wanted to upgrade to a flat panel monitor that'd cost me a good £100 or so, so effectively I could upgrade to that spec for just over £400.

But it's still £400 I don't really need to be spending, and though my PC seems to be running a bit shit at the moment, it's nothing a fresh reinstall wouldn't fix. And if I upgraded the RAM to 256MB and put XP on there it'd run better still.

I'd say £50 ish but that's not to say if you were to stick it on ebay or in your local free paper someone won't offer you £75-100 as it's still cheaper than getting a new PC and is good enough to run most none game programs in windows or being slim line a Linux firewall or media centre (depending on the gfx card).

Graphics card is the built in crap, though Video RAM wise it's not too shabby, but I can see that a decent GFX accelerator card would be a distinct advantage.

It's just whether I can be arsed with forking out money for a new one, or just sort out the existing one. If I wanted to just keep it as it is, I'd just back things up, reinstall Win98, and be selective about the amount of crappy little applications I install that all aid its slowing down, which would take abot 2-3 hours. Or I could upgrade the RAM to 256MB, get Windows XP and buy a flat panel monitor, and make it a bit decent, which would probably cost a good £200 or so, meaning a new PC would only cost me an extra £250 in comparison, and for that money I'd get something shiny and new, a P4 2.8GHz processor, a 16x DVD+/-RW drive, and a 160GB HDD.

Hmm.

If I were keeping it I'd want 256mb for Win98 anyway probably 512 for XP. (1Gb isn't enough for some things in XP really)

As i just linked you from Dell site, £321 delivered :) YKIMS. If you phone them, you can probly convince them to upspec to TFT, and still get the special offer price (with a bit added for TFT). Probly still sub £400 delivered....

Keep thinking i should rip my GB (2 x 512) and shove 2 x 1gb in there...

At this point in time, i can't remember if i have 3 slots or 2, pretty sure its three... so i am now considering another 512, to have 3 x 512...

I really must have a look and actually figure out what type of RAM my computer uses, 'cos I could probably upgrade it to 256MB fairly cheaply these days.

Problem with Dell is when you come to upgrade later, or if something goes faulty a couple of years down the line when it's out of warranty. A lot of the stuff they use is non-standard and therefore expensive to replace e.g. £40 for a power supply.

I could do you a *decent* machine for that money, especially if you don't mind installing your own operating system, and even more so if you keep using that CRT monitor...

e.g.

ASUS K8VSE Deluxe Athlon 64 3000+ Mercury Black/Silver Adata 1GB Dual Channel Maxtor 160GB SATA ASUS WiFi Card Peak Radeon 9250 128MB NEC DL DVDRW

yeah thing is though, by the time the dell is old enough to break or upgrade it will probably be way outta date :)

i always build my own computers, spent about a month or so deciding on just a motherboard as there was loads of new stuff about to come out! still use the comp i put together, it's had a new HDD and memory upgrade over the years but that's it really. i still use a geforce 2 32mb graphics card :)

I would go for a minimum of 512, still won't cost you that much and will make a massive amount of difference to how fast your machine runs. Then wipe it and install windows 2000.

Alternatively if you decide to get rid of it then you probably couldn't do much better than sticking it on ebay, older computers on there still get good prices - search on the desktop pc's category for "completed listings". As long as you make sure the auction ends at a time when plenty of people will be online (ie weekday evening).

Sounds like my PC. I've had the same one since 1998; it's just had two new cases, four new graphics cards, four new processors, four new motherboards, six new hard drives, four new CD/DVD ROM/Writers, four new lots of RAM, two new PSU's and two new monitors.

Best PC I've ever had!

Windows 2000? Eugh! I've heard that that's s**te. I'd go for XP Pro if I was to upgrade.

I was only suggesting the Dell because he's a PC numpty :) I built my PC as well.

Win2000 was based on NT4, ISTR, which makes it rather good.

I think you're confusing it with WinME.

But XP is better.

I never had a problem with ME, it was faster than 98 too.

Yep, I pride myself on it. :-)

i've never had a prob with anything except win 98 and the s**te 95!

i love XP but a lot of people i know hate it, it's fine if you keep it patched and ditch IE for the web brousing ;)