newnewbie

My kids have a freebie desk top system, a dell dimension xps t700r. its bone stock,never been messed with and well,,,,ssslllllooooooowww-er than molasses. we want to upgrade it just for the fun and experience useing as many used parts as we can
its running windows XP has a pentium 3 @698mhz,128MB RAM and a 30 gig HD
they do abit of card games email and music and a small bit of webnet surfing
in your opinions what upgrades would you do?
what parts would you look for or avoid?
thanks
NN

linderman

you could get a used 1GHZ CPU on ebay and remove the one stick of 128mb ram then add two x 256mb

the cpu can be bought now days for around $30.00


here is some info to review

http://www.roberthancock.com/dell/

emosun

Make sure the board in the dell supports cpu's that are higher then 700mhz, from what iv'e found no one has change the cpu in them before. Also the pc allows a maximum of 768mb of ram so go crazy , lol.

Nik00117

With dells be very careful, or you may get stuck with some new hardware that doesn't work.

I had to install a PSU understerday in a dell where the lady went to 115 on a 220 outlet. (could see the burn marks on the inside of the case was pretty funny actually)

Took me a good hour to install the PSU, not because it was a difficult extermely challenging technical task. But because of how user friendly dell makes their PCs to upgrade. Well not really but you get my point, and its not just dells, hell compaq (i mean comcrap) is by far the worst took me 45 mins once to figure out how to replace a HDD without getting out the blow torch. HP isn't far behind either, in fact they are right on the heels so be careful with that kinda products don't wanna waste your cash.

I remember the lady asking me what if the PSU blew something else up would I fix it, I replied very flatly "no" she went why I went cause "i'm not going waste your time or my time on a pile of junk thats going cost you more then its worth"

linderman

you will find on older dell's / HP's / Compaq's / Gateway etc etc etc they used to keep a model current long than they do today


it was possible to see a Dell machine that was sold with a 733mhz cpu but as time went on; Dell also sold that same computer with 933's and 1000ghz cpu's

so as long as your computer model was sold with a higher cpu than the one you have now, youre cool. and updated bios from dell with get you upgraded


however on the contary; if the last cpu ever released by Dell for your model was the 733mhz then the answer will be, NO the 1000ghz will not work ?


hope this helps, if you are still interested we can do alittle research for you ?

kindest regards

joe