upgrading a computer?

Question

I have an old computer that runs on windows 95(i think).I would like to upgrade to a different operating system or version of windows .I dont want to spend alot of money.Can anyone help me.Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If your old computer runs windows 95, I can estimate its an old Intel pentium 1 or AMD K6 processor. You won't be able to upgrade that thing to something that could run WinXP or worst, Vista. However, I've seen win 2000 running ok on a Pentium 1 200Mhz machine with 64MB of ram.

If you really want to upgrade to WinXP, I recommend building your own machine from scratch. That would depend on how close to computer building you are, and also what's your budget for it. If you dare to build it yourself, I would recommend to go for a sempron AM2 processor and 512MB DDR2 memory, they are quite inexpensive and blazing fast for the money. As for hard drive, 80GB is the cheapest one you could get but considerong the price per gigabyte ratio, maybe a 160GB drive is more band for the money. Then add the motherboard, I would go for an asrock with Nvidia 6100 series onboard, and the case with powersupply, there are very good cheap generic ones out there. What about the monitor, you could keep the old one, but if its too old, maybe it can't hold the resolution and frequency of the new video cards, hopefully, windows will know that and configurate itself, but if it fails to do so, you will need to run windows under safe mode and select the resolution and frequency that your monitor can handle

If you don't wan't to even mess around with parts and want to buy a computer from a manufacturer instead, I would check a good old refurbished Dell machine or so, something like Pentium III or 4 or Celeron.

Answer 2

You should take into consideration the available resources on your computer like memory, cpu type and speed and the age of the computer itself. In general, the newer the OS, the more resources it will need. I have experienced as a general rule, that the life span of a computer is around 5 years without upgrading it significantly. With that in mind, if the computer came originally loaded with Win95, you would be pushing the limit to go to Win2K. You could probably get a version from a friend and load it if they have moved on to XP. But without knowing any more about the specifics of your machine, I wouldn't load XP at this point. It would probably run, but you might not like the response. Oh and by the way, stay away from Windows ME which came out just prior to Win2k. On another note, just about any flavor of Linux will run fine as well from the command line. Pick your Linux desktop carefully and you will be OK. Again, all this is specultation until more specifics are know about your computer's configuration.

Answer 3

Surely, I suggest to use linux as o/s. Thats not so difficult and nowadays the graphical user interface is there so it is that easy! to operate. But the latest versions requires a lot of memory, so versions like rehat7, I think should be ok.
Linus o/s are cheap and certain versions like fedora are freely available in the net. Other versions are Suse, mandrake etc.
Make sure to use earlier kernel versions (the one matches to your hardware requirement)

Answer 4

If the computer is that old, you're not going to be able to modernize it cheaply. You're probably better off just demoting it to 'doorstop' and buying a new computer. You can pick up a complete system what's not too shabby for less than $500 these days.

Answer 5

certain, improve to a minimum of 2Gb, the hot popular. bypass to the dell information superhighway website and to ensure what style you want. must be everywhere from $20-40. this can seriously strengthen your pcs performance. pcs have become more on your price range, and also you could get a respectable twin center processor for $500 and a minimum of 2Gb's of ram and a very roomy 200Gb troublesome stress. in case you opt for to make that bounce. one couldn't improve the snap shots card in that pc on the grounds that PCI exhibit did not truly come on that many pcs decrease back then, so in case you improve your entire pc and then improve the snap shots card for a a techniques more advantageous effective pc than the only you've as we talk.

Answer 6

Maybe you need to get a new motherboard to meet the requirements of the latest window version!