I was fortunate enough a while back to have someone give me their old Dell Dimension 2400. This XP box was barely working. It had 256MB of RAM, AOL installed, and spyware oozing out of every crevice of the machine. It was a mess but with a $100 investment I was able to turn it into a mean game playing machine!
The first thing I did was upgrade the RAM and the processor. I dropped in 2 1GB sticks of PC2700 (33MHZ) DDR memory. It's easy to find new memory on sites like Amazon, Kingston, Newegg, and you can get some good deals on ebay. There are many other places to get RAM also just take your pick. The processor was a bit harder to find a great price but I found a 3.06GHZ Norwood Core 533FSB 478 socket P4 at StarMicro.
If you have never upgraded a processor or RAM on a computer or the computer you have has a strange heat sink then I would suggest doing a search for videos showing how to upgrade your particular PC on Youtube. Here is a good video for upgrading RAM and processor on the Dell Dimension 2400.
The next step is to upgrade the video card. The Dell made it easy having an AGP slot for a video card upgrade. I was able to find a 512MB video card on Newegg at the time I wrote this for about $50. You may also need to make sure you have a DVD drive to load some games.
Once you have everything put together, you then need to visit the web site Can you run it? This is a great site that checks your system to see if you have enough machine to run a game that you have your eye on. It's a great site and can save you some bucks if your system just isn't up to speed for a game you want to play. It can also tell you what you may need to beef up in order to play a certain game.
So if you have a P4 laying around that you might want to upgrade then first find the specifications for the machine. Look on the internet or find the spec. sheet hidden away in a box from when it was purchased years ago. Then find out how far you can upgrade it. Some machines just might not be able to take the upgrades you would need to do in order to play the games you want to be playing on it. So do your homework first.
My 11 year old is going to be one happy camper when he finds out he can play Supreme Commander 2 now on the old Dell :D
Happy Upgrading!
Dan
Great little upgrade article Dan.
ReplyDeleteI've also decided to build a P4 gaming system I obtained completely free. A Pentium 4 2.4Ghz 533FSB with 2GB of RAM and a 6800GTX (AGP). Unfortunately it is not able to handle the Valve Game title Team Fortress 2 which I'd hope it could. Most other game titles appear to work quite well otherwise.
From experience the CPU is often a bottleneck, it is great however to refresh an old computer to see it playing the latest PC games all over again.