Help in increasing performance of 5 year old desktop

I have a Gateway 560GE with a P4 3.0ghz cpu and 2.5 Gb of DDR ram

The model is 5 years old but I had it for 3 1/2 and just got the motherboard working after almost a year of non usage, The original 250 Gb Sata doesn't have a working windows on it but I'm using a 20gb IDE from my backup as the master boot and my PSU is around 300w

will installing windows and running it from my Sata and getting a better PSU increase performance?

 

Hi and welcome aboard. Sadly, the short answer is no on PSU and a tad on SATA, doubt you'd notice it and unless you want to upgrade your video card for playing games, then depending on the card you will most likely need a better PSU. You have enough RAM so the video is the only thing left. The only question left is how much money do you want to sink into a 5 year old machine?

 

I just wanted to add that if it's a 5200RPM IDE drive as opposed to a 7200RPM SATA drive then yes, you will notice a decent speed increase. I would definitely use the SATA in any case, just for the size of it for starters and the larger caches.

 

If you have the money look at SSDs.

 

I wouldn't put an SSD in such an old machine.

 

I see your computer has integrated/onboard video. But, it also has PCI Express slots. Some of the lower-end PCI Express video cards are not very expensive, if purchased from online sources such as newegg.com, and would improve performance. So, in my opinion, that would be a practical upgrade for your computer.