Dell Vostro 200 desktop, mini tower form factor, new loaded with XP Home.
Bought this system new for a family member as a replacement for their 10+ year old system.
Will primarily be used for word processing,document storage,some photo work, and of course, surfing the net, little or no gaming use at all.
Here are it's specs:
Processor - Intel® Core 2 Duo Processor E4500 (2.20GHz, 800FSB 2MB L2)
Memory - 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz
Hard Drive - 160GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
Video Card - Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 3100
I have not even tried this system out yet, I am looking to upgrade the RAM to 2 GB and to add another 160 GB hard drive, would this be counterproductive? Worth the expense?
It is basically a budget tower, with little room for expansion, but will be a rocket as is compared to what they have now.....
Any advice, tips are greatly appreciated, Thanks in advance
How-To Geek Forums » Windows XP
XP Home efficiency
(8 posts)
It appears to me all those specs are fine unless you want to do any of the following:
Games that require a good graphics card
Lots of Video Editing. You may still be able to do some with that hardware, it just won't encode the video that fast. So it would take a while if you did Video Editing a lot.
Heavy multitasking like Firefox with 30+ tabs, email program, Virtual Machines running, etc all at the same time.
So for the things you mentioned you don't need to upgrade anything for at all.
One upgrade you may want to do though is an extra hard drive or other storage device for backup of pictures and other things.
You're Welcome.
Also space wise I forgot to mention if the computer is going to be used with a camera that saves pictures in raw format at above 5 megapixels and is used a lot then that could change that amount of space needed by a lot.
In my experience of taking pictures in JPG format at 5 megapixels and short videos in MOV format at 640x480 at normal events like Birthday Parties and Holidays, the pictures didn't take that much space at all.
In fact all of pictures and videos for last year took about 2 GB of space.
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