Totally OT: Value of my PC?

It's worth next to nothing, however, if you're buying a new machine, the only one to buy is a Mac Mini.

Well that cheered me up :)

Nah, you're probably thinking of ME as someone else said. XP is just

2000 with a load of fancy crap bolted on that you'll never use and will just slow your machine down.

i use quite of the lot of fancy crap on XP, didn't realise till i used XP home round a friends and found loads of proggys missing :( mainly drive managment stuff.

I think most of it is there in 2000, but it's probably more hidden away in a different place. Not too sure though.

yup, i got well confused between xp and 2000, i end up running the control panel in XP the old way as the XP way is just gay and can't find anything!

I run my Control Panel in Win98 the Mac way - got it set up as a sub-menu off the start menu - much easier.

Yup, loads better that way - XP does it as well.

It is.

If you're buying it, then save money by going for XP Home. It's exactly the same as Pro, minus the support for Domains and multiple-CPUs - neither of which you will use. Obviously if you're going to just use a copied version, then it may as well be Pro.

Win 2000 is NT5. Some of it is from NT4, but the vast majority of it was rewritten from scratch.

Win XP is NT5.1 - it's all of Windows 2000, with some extra bits, and some bugs fixed. You can think of it as Version 2 of Windows 2000.

Windows XP with Service Pack 2 is an order of magnitude better than any of Microsoft's previous desktop operating systems, and should be your only choice for one of today's PCs.

It's especially good for none-savvy PC users - the ActiveX-stopper alone has taken a NICE chunk out of my workload !

If you don't know what you're doing, then buy a DELL.

If you have a *knowledgeable* friend (ie, REALLY knowledgeable, not fake knowledge) then get him to spec and build it. He'll use nice branded kit, and it'll be great. He'll also use an Athlon 64, and you'll be able to run the 64-bit WinXP when it's finished. I'd do it for a couple of pints, if you were in North Yorkshire.

You won't get much more than £50 to someone in the know. You'll prolly get £100 if you stick it in the local paper, as an "Internet Ready PC".

It's unlikely to go wrong within it's useful life.

If it does go wrong, then it'll almost certainly be the PSU as above, so you'll have to spend £40 on a replacement.

Hard Drive or Optical drives are the only other things that die these days (Hard Drive WILL die if it's not a Seagate, and even then it will probably still die), and they're both standard in DELLs, so you could replace either for peanuts. I can't rememeber the last time I replaced anything else in any of our PCs here.

You'd basically need new *everything* to get it upto new-DELL-spec - so it's quicker and easier just to buy the DELL.

Obviously if you're happy about upgrading it yourself, then do so. You'll end up with a nicer Athlon64 setup for slightly less than the DELL.

Then you'd have spent lots of time, and still have a pile of shit. If you aren't moving to XP (ie, more RAM required), then don't bother.

You really need 512MB. Your PIII-700 will take PC133 SDRAM, which isn't cheap these days

£88 for a pair of sticks. You'd have to buy from eBay to get it for £sensible.

The equivalent 512MB of DDR for your new PC would only be £36

you could buy that and a Motherboard (£20) and a CPU (£40 for an AMD Sempron) for only a smidgeon more than the RAM alone for your existing PC !

Yes - buy the new PC. Or preferably (get someone to) build an Athlon64 setup.

Is that a bit like "Corsa: Show the world you know f*ck all about cars" ? :-)

Ages ago I thought of doing this, not just for myself, but as a little sideline, but I looked at prices of individual bits from people advertising in the likes of Personal Computer World (I think one was Simply Computers) and couldn't see how I could do it any amount cheaper, let alone to make a few quid on selling them. Suppose there are better + cheaper sources for bits, at a guess. My only main gripe about doing this, is getting stuff that *really* works well in conjunction with each other, not just is compatible. Then there's all sorts of potential hardware conflicts that I'd worry about appearing.......

Aye, I was about right about what it's worth then. Like I've said, it's just a matter of whether or not I can be arsed upgrading. I think I could do a lot worse than to just upgrade the RAM on mine to 512MB and stick XP on it tbh.

To save me looking it up - does anyone know off the top of their head what type of RAM I'd have in a Dell Optiplex GX200 System, and roughly how much a pair of 256MB chips would be?

Ah, ok. Though it would appear that it was probably Windows ME I was thinking about.

That's useful. I always like to go for the best available product if I'm bothering with putting effort into getting something half decent, and thought that Pro would be the obvious choice - looks like Home'll do the job nicely.

I'll look into these Athlon64 jobbies at some point then. I've always been of the mindset "Intel=good and a known quantity, AMD and others=not sure exactly how they compare, so stick to intel". I suppose I'm of the same mentality when it comes to computers as someone who goes out and buys a new Corsa every 3 years.

Hey look, this is going strangely back on-topic for the group :-)

Ooh, didn't realise how expensive RAM might be for mine - I thought it'd be older technology, so cheaper and more bargain basement stylee.

Or just stick with what I've got for a while, as it does what I want it to do just fine. But then that's just it - there are a fair few things I could do with using my computer for that would benefit from more RAM/quicker CPU etc etc............

That doesn't really happen any more, out of the last 5 or PC's i've been involved in building (including one that came all in at under £200 and isn't actaully that bad) i havn't had any kind of hardware conflict issues.

As Nom said up there, that'll sting you for about £90...

See previous posts :)

Unless you plan to get XP64 later this year or run a 64bit Linux distro of linux don't bother if you want AMD just get a 32bit version and save a few more pounds.

The latest Intel chip family is the pentium M range and apart from being clocked slower are much better than the Athlon64 (faster clock for clock & much cooler) unfortunately it's hard to get a good mother board.