What should I upgrade?

Have a Dell dimension 2350, Pent 4, 2.4ghz, 256 ram, 27gig and 19gig hard drive, XP home, CD drive, DVD player.

No gaming, general use computer, IE 7, spreadsheets, cad, etc.

Am thinking of adding some ram, have capacity for 2 x 512.
Would upgrading this ram guarantee improved performance?

Speed seams slow in general ... especially online apps and rebooting.

Have done advised maintenance (ie defrag, regscrub, delete files, eliminate startups/background, etc)

Haven't pursued possible malware issues yet. Do have AVG and XPfiremon.

I also want to upgrade to a dvd burner/player.

So, is this machine worthy of upgrading?

What would you upgrade?

Thanks.

 

Welcome to MajorGeeks!

Yes, some RAM would be a big improvement!

 

No, it's not worth upgrading in my opinion. The components are so old that you will have a hard time finding compatible ones for the upgrade, and even if you do, they will cost a lot especially comparing to their performance.

By upgrading, you could only marginally improve the performance of your computer. I would recommend buying a new PC and see a 10x improvement in speed. You can build a new PC with just about $300 that will be a whole lot faster than your current computer.

 

A 512MB from crucial.com only costs $17.99 plus shipping. That seems like a good deal to me; a small cost to extend the useful life of that computer.

 

Looking at the documentation for your Dimension 2350, confirms that your PC currently can support a maximum of 1GB RAM.

More memory/RAM is always better, so it wouldn't hurt to upgrade to the max supported. Although, I'd tend to agree with Felixmagician. You may want to look into getting a new machine all together. Your PC appears to be about 5-6 years old, correct?

But, as far as the RAM/memory upgrade, I would suggest the following:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820141316

 

Your PC is of low spec and you could upgrade RAM but only to PC2100 (266-MHz) DDR SDRAM (non-ECC), which is pretty low speed.

I would recommend you buy a new PC , you can get good deals in many places

Or build your own if you are an enthusiast

 

I think you should forget about the computer you have now and buy a new one that would be a HUGE difference.