Old system Athlon XP 2500 running Win 7, upgrades?

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mechjames

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Hi.
I had an old Windows XP System made by Northgate Computers. I believe it was bought around 2004-2006. We've used it off and on but now it was mostly a secondary computer. The windows XP install was original after all this time,and starting to get buggy and glitchy, so I thought I would see if I could upgrade it to Windows 7.

It originally had a MSI motherboard but it got switched out to an Asus A7V8X-X when the capacitors went. It has a Radeon X1300 AGP and Windows 7 is using the vista legacy drivers fine.

I'm running 1.75GB of Ram and it runs pretty decent with windows 7. Can't use google chrome because the athlon doesn't support SSE2. And using IE and Firefox is pretty slow, so I'm using K-Meleon, and browsing the internet is pretty quick.

I have 3 slots on the motherbard for RAM. There is a 256MB stick, a 1GB stick, and 512MB stick. Crucial.com says they're PC2100, but I believe 1 is a PC2100, another one is PC2400 and the 1 GB one is a PC3200. ,and that I could run 3GB of PC2700 or PC3200 Unbuffered Non-EEC ram if I wanted to.

This goes against the owners manual from asus which says I could only run 1 stick of a PC3200. I also picked up 3 x 1GB of PC3200 ram off craigslist and stuck it in and the system would not boot. Couldn't get to bios screen. It must have be buffered EEC? So i threw the 3 old sticks back in and it worked. I threw in my 1GB old stick and 1 GB PC3200 new stick but it only recognized 1GB.

I wanted to see if I could get windows 8 on it, but the Athlon XP 2500+ doesn't support SSE2,PAE, NX, etc.

What would be the best processor I could buy off ebay for this motherboard that would be the fastest and possibly support the SSE2,PAE,NX features? It runs windows 7 but a lot of software requires that now to run (Google Chrome, etc).It's a decent system and I would like to max it out as good as I can! Also, what is the best old AGP video card to find?
 
cut your losses. Get a new computer if you want to run modern software.

If you were just doing the same things you were doing 10years ago then fine keep it, but you're not, you want to do modern things.

The money you spend to upgrade a 10year old computer get you more than halfway to some economy prebuilt bundled computer. Even the [censored] one will run circles around what you are planning.
It will also be much smaller, use much less power and be quieter and cooler.
 
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+1 to Raysteng said.

I'd get i5 or i7 processors and take it from there.

Also: old AGP based vid cards no longer being supported by all recently released mobo, so your option is pretty much non-existent (if you decide to stay on with your old/ several yrs old mobo).

Start fresh instead. Not worth holding onto old mobo and stuff anymore.

(case to the point: recently I built an Intel J1900 based mobo, ended up having to buy a brand new PCI-x NIC card in order to construct a firewall. All my older (gig based) PCI based NIC cards, including some seriously good Intel NICs cannot be used in this mobo...*sigh*)

Q.
 
Your old computer:
Processor: 357 Horsepower (Passmark benchmark score)
Video Card: 40 Horsepower (Passmark benchmark score)
Hard Drive: 158 Horsepower (Guessing 55MB/s sequential read rate plus 106 IOPS QD=1 based on several disks I have benchmarked and some googling.)
Total System: 555 Horsepower.

Budget new computer:
Processor: Intel i3 4170 ($99) 5,422 Horsepower
Graphics: Intel HD 4400 ($0) 542 Horsepower
Hard Drive: Samsung 850 Evo 250 GB SSD ($98) 10,540 Horsepower
Total System: 15,252 Horsepower.

Don't waste a dime on that old machine. For $400 or so you can build a new budget machine that will be 30 times more powerful and use less electricity and heat up your computer room less and have all new parts that aren't already past their expected lifespan... You will notice the difference in performance similar to what the "horsepower" numbers would suggest. It will be like driving a 250 HP VW Golf, then stepping into a 7,500 HP Top-Fuel dragster for a 4-second 300 MPH rip down the drag strip.
 
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I'm typing this with Dell Vostro 1000 laptop running Window XP SP3. Processor: AMD Athlon TK-53 799 MHz, 2GB DRAM.

It's a little slow but I don't use this laptop for anything else, so it is okay as of now.

When this laptop is done, I don't know which platform I will replace this laptop with. Desktop, tablet, netbook ... or another laptop. At that time I will ask for advices.
 
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No reason to keep anything on that rig, agree with cutting losses and getting a cheap modern socket/ram system. I build, repair, upgrade computers as a hobby for almost 15 years, it's always best to do this in most cases unless you have a modern socket motherboard/ram.

Sometimes the slightly older stuff may be worth upgrading, like a socket 775 single core celeron if the motherboard supports multi core chips, since those dirt cheap now and the performance difference is huge.

Socket A has been dead quite some time.
 
Hey, I have a old Athlon 2500 XP. Runs at 1.3 Ghz, got 80 Gig HD, and 2 Gig of ram.

I'm still running XP. It will play YouTube videos just barely, often choppy video(need a better card) you can't multitask when watching videos.

I also have a BlueRay/DVD/Cdrom/1.44" floppy/5.25" floppy/tape drive QIC-80/serial add on card/Zip Drive/WinTV card.

It is simply a Archival machine. Loaded with floppy utilities, emulators, and image files from my laptop as a backup.
 
What others have already said is pretty accurate.

Looks like your mobo will take either an Athlon or a Duron, neither of which supports 64 bit computing, PCI only no PCIe, no USB 3, won't even support a modern browser.

Your best bet is to change out the case, motherboard, cpu, memory, hard drive, power supply, add a DVD burner............oh, wait....... yep, what they said!
grin.gif
 
Sounds like a perfectly usable computer, keep it! I love running older hardware as long as I can with Linux. Throw Linux Mint on there and you would be surprised what that thing can do! My main computer is a Dell E310 from 2004. I have 2GB of RAM and I am running Linux Mint MATE. This thing runs very well. I will use it for a long time.
 
If you want to upgrade economically, check ebay for Dell Precision T3500 with Xeon Quad core processor or even T5500 with hexacore processor.

It is usually around $200, some without Hard Drive a little less but you can get 1,2,3 TB HD for under $100. Find one that comes with a Win 7 COA so you don't have to buy any OS.

So around $300, you can get an awesome super fast computer.
Not bad since they are around $2000 when new 5 years ago.

I was in your shoes trying to keep a relic Pentium D computer that roars every time I tried to watch Youtube video.
 
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Throw it out. Check dell outlet, and the coupon codes.

I have a new refurbished inspiron laptop that was $149 shipped to my door. Not high end but runs fine.

You can spend 300-400 dollars and get a nice refurb optiplex business class desktop, that will have the windows license also.

I'm not real big on huge desktop PC's for average use, you can get a small optiplex 990 or 9020 for cheap.

Pull the hard drive out of the computer you have and donate it to somebody.
 
Well after running WIN 7 for a few weeks i'm going back to WinXP on this system. There's an athlon 3000+ for $10 for sale locally on eBay and i'll find the best used 8X AGP vid card (they seem to go for $20-$30 or so)for the value and this should be good for a few more years. Windows XP is getting updates til 2019. It'll be pretty fast when i find some cheap ram and max it out to 3GB

K-melion is a great firefox based web browser and was fast under Win 7. I can't wait to see how fast it will be under XP again. Libreoffice/Openoffice still updates their Win XP versions too.

I'm just using this system to basically browse the net in the Garage and use it as a network hard drive for videos/pics/files etc. I use my Acer Laptop for day to day use most of the time and my Galaxy S3.

I just like using up old hardware. My Deskjet 5740 that came with this system 10+ years ago just kicked the bucket now. I resurrected a Canon BJC-1000 that my grandmother gave me a while back (paralel cable LPT1 port lol!) and genuine Canon ink color ink cartridges are less then $5 on ebay! This printer is also hooked up to this system and networked with another Win 7 and it even works over network on my Win 8 laptop!

For good quality prints I have a Photosmart 8150.
 
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You're using a computer with a Socket A processor? In 2015?

the platform is 14 years old now if i recall correctly. Thoroughbred was good back in its day but i would keep the 40$ because the upgrades you are looking for won't net you much performance over what you already have. You're talking a 300mhz bump in clock speed for the processor.

i can see the trepidation in replacing the system. However it is entirely obsolete, and the dollars you spend attempting to speed it up would be better saved towards it's eventual replacement. You could probably find a couple year old craigslist special for 40$ that has a am3/fm2/lga2011 socket and ddr 3 ram + pcie
 
Originally Posted By: Denwad
You're using a computer with a Socket A processor? In 2015?

the platform is 14 years old now if i recall correctly. Thoroughbred was good back in its day but i would keep the 40$ because the upgrades you are looking for won't net you much performance over what you already have. You're talking a 300mhz bump in clock speed for the processor.

Yup! in 2015! Almost seems faster then my Win 8 x64bit laptop from Acer!

The processor upgrade is only $10. I was only estimating $30 for the video cards, I bet they could be found cheaper!
 
I'm rocking an Athlon 64 3000+ (single core) in an ASUS K8N with 2G DDR1 and an AGP Nvidia 6600. It is overclocked from 2.08 to 2.4Ghz. I replaced XP over a year ago with Linux Mint 174 Xfce and it runs very good for such antiquity.

I have an untested AGP Gainward GFX MX-440, if interested I'd send your way.
 
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