Upgrade or New?

Hi all,

My current pc has the following specifications, which was self built in 2007.

Asus P5N-E SLI 650i Socket 775 PCI-E Onboard Audio ATX Motherboard
Intel E4400 Socket 775 2x2.00GHz 800MHz FSB 2MB Cache
2 x Kingston 1GB DDR2 667MHz / PC2-5300 MEMORY CL5 1.8V NON ECC UNBUFFERED
Coolermaster IGreen 500W PSU - 85% Efficiency ATX12V v2.2 120mm Fan
Inno3D 7300GT 256MB Silent Passive Cooler 128bit DVI VGA PCI-E
OS - XP but will be installing win 7 after upgrades.

Are there any components that I can upgrade to make it work quicker and better for my current needs, or will what will be gained not worth the hustle and cost.

I have been doing the usually system cleaning and maintenance but think it's time for an upgrade of parts or even a new build/new pc purchase. Which will be the best option

Used mainly for programming, web design, movies, internet etc. No games at all.

Thanks.

In what way(s) is it slow at present?

There might be a number of ways of speeding up that setup without spending any cash. At you dead set on upgrading to Windows 7?

For your needs I would upgrade the memory to 4GB or more and install Windows 7 64-bit. You could always drop in a faster quad-core processor if the m/b supports it, but otherwise it seems fine.

It now takes longer to do work using the pc, that is for programs to load up, files to open etc.
any suggestions for the number of ways to speed it up if the setup looks okay?

If you built the system in 2007, chances are you havent got one of the latest generations of hard drives. In 2010, a couple of the big manufacturers were able to make a step in internal hard drive performance. We've had SATA2 interfaces for a few years now which the interface is capable of 300mbps, but unfortuneately the internal parts of the hard drive were still limited to around 100-125mbps.

In 2010 they've been able to nearly double the internal hard drive speeds, which makes a big difference when your copying large files or doing virus scans etc.

The solid state drives are still quite expensive for a good performance drive with reasonable capacity, but will almost certainly give you a instant boost. Be sure to check the read and write speed performance. a lot of drives have blinding read performance, but dismal write performance.

Do a little research into prices and performance of the solid state drives vs the new generation hard drives.

PS.

Upgrade your case ventelation and use filters if you can.

Plenty.

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