upgrade my Gateway

[c_ray]

Hi guy I am new to the board and I was wanting to upgrade my pc I would like to know what I need to up grade.

1. It is a Gateway Essential 400MHz
celeron pc
Micro tower case
2. Int sound and 8MB AGP
3. 128 MB Memory
4. 6.8 GB hard drive.
5. motherboard freeman what ever that means?

I was thinking about upgrading the processor and the hard drive. I think that I have enough memory and a large enough video card. What do you think I should upgrade. any suggestion would help thanks

[Sabbath]

I think your upgrade all depends on what you are using / going to use the computer for. Then you need to see if your board will upgrade to what you want and go from there.

[GroundZero3]

Sabbath is right. if your gonna be playing intense games i would upgrade the video card. also what os you runing? im assuming win98. from what i understand win9x does a very bad job on handling more than 128 meaning it would be pointless to upgrade the memory.

Jason

[c_ray]

I have installed a scanner and it is slowing it down a bit. I don't use it for game. yes it is win 98. I found out that the motherboard will work up to a 766MHz. and any hard drive would work. will this speed it up by moving up to a 766MHz a lot or will it be a small amount.

[Sabbath]

I don't really mess with scanners much so I don't know exactly how they work or what you would need to make it go faster. I am sure somebody here can help you in that department. As far as going from a 400mhz to a 766mhz chip, I don't think you are going to have a problem noticing a difference in the speed of your system.

[RayH]

The general rule of thumb used to be upgrade if you are at least going to double your microprocessor speed.

Is the microprocessor you want available in Slot 1 or is there a socket to Slot 1 available?

Get some more RAM. The faster the microprocessor, the more the RAM. RAM is cheap right now.

If you need more hard drive, just slave a new one to your existing.

[Rat]

you should notice a pretty good difference in speed with the processor your'e thinking of. you said you added a scanner and the system slowed down... what other software did you add? if you will be using the system for graphics work, then more memory would be advisable. apparently something in the way of software that you recently added has put more strain on the sytem resources ... mainly the memory .... use the three finger salute ... alt+ctrl+delete ... to see what is running in the background, everything listed there is running from boot-up. you can stop some of those apps from loading at startup by running msconfig and unchecking them under the startup tab.

rat...

[Warthog]

Go to a 766mhz PIII or AMD processor. DON'T do celeron. Celery sucks tbe big one. I went from 400 celeron to 800 PIII and the difference was tremendous. What speed is your hard drive? That also makes a big difference. I had also upgraded from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm drive. I'm assuming it's 5400.

You're ok with memory and video card at the moment. Minimum anyone should have is 128, IMO. Absolute minimum (in other words, not so great performance) is 64mb. You'll all set. Since you don't play games, the video is perfectly fine.

You can get a 7200rpm 20gb hd for about $100. Actually, I'm probably high on that estimate. Proc is less. P3 733mhz is about
$150. Do those upgrades, and you will have a much faster PC. The proc speed will be doubled, hd speed increased a lot and Bus speed doubled.

Warthog

[c_ray]

Thanks guy, Warthog I will look for a larger hard drive and p3 thanks. RAT I have looked on the startup boot and it has way to may thing trying to run in the background I will try your suggestion thanks. by read my manual it seem when the processor is installed that win. 98 will pick it up auto. I hope.
Thanks again