Bit of advice regarding older PC (worth upgrading or not?)

[VR46]

I've grown so out of touch with PC components over last couple of years, have a roughly three year old PC the son has in his bedroom, feel it needs a CPU, memory and hard drive upgrade (no problem, only £50 for another 1GB of memory and bigger hard drive). But CPU wise it has a XP3000 (2.17ghz) AMD Socket A processor in it. All is built around this motherboard

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K7S41GX

Looking on ebuyer the oldest Athlon CPU's I can see are Socket AM2 - these aren't even compatible are they ? so, build a fresh system or upgrade ? any assistance appreciated.

Would help if I told you the system isn't really used for playing games (it had a 6600GT in it anyway), mainly used for everyday basic stuff and a fair bit of video recoding (to PSP format and the like).

PS. It's running Windows XP.

Cheers.

[kernow]

if its not used for gaming, I'd just fill it up with RAM and get a faster cpu off ebay for it, as cheap as possible really. a secondary, faster hard drive might help to just to use for storage, or as a main system drive. Seems like its a pretty good spec already for just a non gaming box, so I'd leave the current video card in it. I wouldn't waste the money on a brand new system if you can upgrade it for 50-100 quid.

although you can get a whole new pc now for £300 new with screen. so its swings and roundabouts really. I'd personally just stack it with RAM and try to get a compatible CPU for it. not sure about the sockets though, its been a while since I've built one too, and that was a quad core intel.

[VR46]

Thanks for the reply, it has a touch screen monitor (worth much more than the system) so not worried about a new monitor. Confused on the processor description though

http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopCPUResult.aspx?f1=AMD+Athlon%e2%84%a2&f2=&f3=&f4=&f5=&f6=&f7=&f8=&f9=&f10=False&

is the Athlon CPU list, but all seem to say Socket 754 or 939 (not the Socket A(462)) I'm after. Just need someone to clarify what are compatible with my motherboard please and I'm sorted.

Thanks.

EDIT: the fastest processor available for that socket type is an XP3200 (only about 100ghz faster), so will stick with the processor I have for now.

[Hohum]

Daresay you'd be better off just replacing the system David... Tesco have a great deal on a desktop PC (think I saw the link to it on this forum not so long ago):

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.204-0126.aspx

Specs are very good for the money, in my opinion. Anyway, just a potential solution.

[VR46]

Thanks for the link, but just going to stick with the memory and hard drive upgrade at the moment.

[Hohum]

In that case, you'd prolly be looking at about ?100 overall (2GB DDR is about ?45, hard drive about the same for a decent capacity, plus the postage costs).

[VR46]

Only need another 1GB stick and a 160gb hard drive will give enough storage space. Holliss Value PC's ftw

[Hohum]

Try and find out what speed/brand your existing stick is then, as sometimes mixing different speeds/brands doesn't work out too well. You could get a 160gb drive for about ?30, but it doesn't seem like good value for money when you could get a drive twice the size for an extra ?6 or so.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-027-HI

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-028-HI