Hand me down computer - rebuild

I have a Dell desktop that I purchased in 1997 that I'm looking to hand down to a friend whose daughter is in high school (for papers, internet research, etc.). Right now, the computer bogs down where it takes forever to boot up, load webpages, etc. I think one of the bigger issues is the hard drive is too small to accomodate XP.

Back in 2002, I did some memory upgrades to 256MB. I remember I had to purchase through Dell because the memory they were selling a retailers had a different bus speed than mine would support. First thing I was going to do was put in a new hard drive. Do I need more memory and do I need a newer processor? Or should a bigger hard drive resolve most of the problems?

I'm hesitant to spend too much because once I get up around $200, it's just a small leap to get a new system that's probably 5x better than this would be rebuilt. Thanks for your assistance.

 

I would not spend any money on this computer being 9 years old.
Do you have the DEll Driver disk? Then I would use the XP disk(If you still have it) to wipe the hardrive and do a clean install.

 

I would do a reformat and install win98SE or 2000 with a fancy shell pack for a girl. It'll run faster, the shell pack will make it look shnazzy.
Alternatively, grab a cheap 20GB HDD to drop into it and as zephra said clean re-install of xp but choose the "performance" option in visual styles.

 

I agree with the others - I wouldn't shell too much cash out for this PC. Does it have a seperate video card (AGP or PCI)? If it has one of the two, or even on-board video, I have found that a cheap performance boost on older PC's like this one is an upgrade or addition of the video . . . especially if it has onboard video.

eBay is a good source for older PCI or AGP video cards. It's a thought.

I bought my first PC in 1997 . . . it had a 4mb (shared) PCI video card. A replacement card with 16mb of on-board memory was a major improvement . . . and cheap - purchased the card used at a local computer store (Matrox, I think . . . been a while).

Certainly reformat the PC and start anew. Check the 'net for XP tweaks . . . even consider falling back on an older OS, like Win98 if that is an option. It has been my experience with older PC's that it is better as far as performance goes to use the older OS when your PC has the minimum or close to the minimum requirements for the newer OS. Sad that Microsoft stopped supporting '98 in July . . .