Easiest way to speed up my 'puter??

[ECVZZ 0]

While twiddling my thumbs waiting for an m-peg to load, I started thinking about upgrading my computer. My 733 celeron is slower than christmas and starting to drive me nuts.
I have a mid-tower w/ a 733 celeron (onboard audio and video) 196 megs of PC100 SDRAM (I know, I know..PC100 is slow) a 20 GIG 5400rpm harddrive, 48x CD-ROM, 3 1/2 floppy, no cd burner or DVD, and no external bay avail. to add one. I have a 56k dial up connection that only connects at 28 to 33k most of the time.
I can only go up to a 1.1 gig celeron w/ the socket 370 motherboard that I have now, and would like to go with an Athlon CPU with DDR memory. I don't know if the socket A motherboard will fit into my mid-tower though.
It is also entirely possible that IF (I don't know if it's avail. where I live) I can get a DSL connection I may find that I really don't need to screw with my computer.
So...any thoughts from the technically minded among us?
G. Jones
"Why don't they have a light bulb that only shines on things that are worth looking at?"

[gale 0]

Well, I have DSL and love it so I say go with that it's easiest. If you want to get a CD-burner or a DVD that's not a problem as they make external ones for people like you who don't have free bays. In fact, there are models that combine CD-burner and DVD player all in one. Check this article out for a review of two of them.
DSL gets my vote (assuming you're talking about Internet speedup primarily)
Gale
Life's not worth living if you can't feel alive

[lummy 4]

Greg,
Sounds like you know what you are talking about. Couple of questions, what OS are you running? What do you use the computer for? Games? work (Word, Excel...)Surfing the net? Graphics?
The easiest way to make a computer faster (usually) is to increase the memory. OS's like Win2k and better (HAH!!!)need at least 256 megs to keep most apps in memory without caching to the Hard drive.

I'm sure you know this, but the FSB speed means more for performance than CPU speed. I was at a hardware manufacturer's seminar a few weeks ago wher Intel presented and I seem to remember them promising a 250 and 266mhz (MY BAD, that is for the DDR memory, the FSB will be 500 and 533 mhz,according to my notes) FSB motherboard within the next few months using DDR memory. I may be wrong about the actual speeds, I was there for the free lunch
If you want faster internet, take a look at www.dslreports.com to see what's available for you. Nowadays, there are at best 2 DSL providers in an area, everyone else is reselling.
Quick fix for a 56k connection. There is a registry hack to increase one of the input buffers (rwin???) that usually helps fro mwhat I understand. I seem to remember seeing that hack on DSLreports too.
Lastly, take a look at your Systray (Clock). Got a lot of crap loading up down there? Do you even know half the crap that is there? All that crap starts up and hogs up system resources. Right click on the icon and scroll down to properties, if you don't know what it is, more than likely you don't need it. Typically,all I will have are my sound control, my Antivirus and IM's. Real Player(BIG BIG offender), Winzip, GAIN (another big offender,GATOR) run JUST fine without being started every single time.
Just my .02
I've got to stop wishing, got to go fishing, I'm down to rock bottom again....

[prost 0]

Depends. When do you notice it being slow? When you say an m-peg to load do you mean download or load from the hard drive?
William

[rogue108 0]

As it has been said it depends on what the purpose of your computer is. If its to surf the net then what you have should be more than fast enough. I am still using a AMD 400 with 64 megs of memory and its more than adequate for most tasks, but gaming. If its the download time for the internet that is killing you than a faster connection will remedy that problem. The two things that really help a computer be fast is the FSB and RAM.

[jtval 0]

throw it out the window of a high building...that should speed it up a bit.getting high is fun, but coming down is the best part
JT

[trmnljnky 0]

freefall just a thout
Byron

[trmnljnky 0]

freefall just a thought
Byron

[pilotdave 0]

Recently upgraded my server to an Athlon 1700 with gobs of DDR RAM. I'd WOULD HAVE said the easiest way to speed up a computer is to "throw in" a new motherboard and processor, but it took me a long time to get mine working. I'd suggest going with a new barebones system (just a case, motherboard, processor, and power supply). Problems with my upgrade were capacitors on the new motherboard touching other stuff inside the computer (the zip drive was the biggest culprit), causing shorts. Took me forever to figure out what was going on though. Other problems, or at least slowdowns, were connecting the power button/LEDs from the case to the motherboard. Once I got the damn thing to turn on, I had all kinds of problems getting my video and ethernet cards to work properly. In the end it was definitely worth the upgrade (microsoft flight sim 2002 is so smooth now!), but I think I'm going to go gray a few years early because of it. In fact I still havent finished putting the computer back together. It's in pieces all over my room. But it works!
If it's just download speeds that are giving you trouble, DSL or cable internet will fix that real fast.
Dave
http://www.skydivingmovies.com