shebre

I recently looked into upgrading the memory in my Dell Dimension 8250 and was dismayed to find out that while most memory is so cheap, the memory that I need for my dell could cost close to $700 for 1MB. And forget about ever upgrading it again!
It looks like getting a new motherboard and memory would be a cheaper route. I see that I will also need a new case/power supply. But I have a couple of questions.
-Can I keep my disk and hard drives?
-What about processor?
-Is it really difficult to do? The most I have ever done is replace video/sound cards and I dont want to get in over my head.
-Any recommendations for motherboards etc? (This machine would be mostly used for gaming)


Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Sarkast

I assume you mean 700$ for 1Gb ? Well just a suggestion - DONT buy memory from Dell. I checked the prices on their page and it blew me away.

You can get "value RAM" even from decent companies like kingston, corsair etc for probably around 120$ for a Gb. (depending where you buy)

My opinion is - building a PC is really easy. I didnt bother with PCs for over 4 years - last time i built one AMD K6-2s were "da bomb". ;-) But it was no big deal. I did some research online - for components i wanted and what i wanted out of my new PC. I ordered everything - came within a few days.

Putting it together took about 2 hours. I also modified my case a bit and made sure all the cable clutter was reduced to a minimum.
What can i say - i built a P4 system with 2.4Ghz CPU (running at 2.9Ghz) and 512Mb Kingston Hyper X RAM (ebay) plus new Albatron PX865PE PRO V2.0, WD 80 Gb HDD, Thermaltake PSU and a decent grafics card for under 350$. Works like a charm...

Like i said - you can easily upgrade your Dell for MUCH less than DELL asks for memory which would probably be the cheapest way to upgrade.

If you decide to build a new system - you can keep your CPU, Harddrive, disk and optical drives of course. Just make sure when you buy a new motherboard it supports your current CPU.