Most Important Thing To Upgrade First?

[Baloh]

My computer is decent in my eyes.

It was an alienware I got two years ago, ran great back then, I've upgraded the graphics card, and a few things, and recently though, it hasn't been performing as well.

I'm wondering what is, to people, the first most important piece to upgrade...memory? mobo? graphics card?

Suggestions are appreciated, and if you have general knowledge of some things I could do to tweak my computer up to par, please let the suggestions for this fly too.

edit: computer specs:
2.4ghz Pentium 4
768mb ddr sdram
geforce fx5600

[Rob Williams]

Welcome to the forums!

By the looks of your specs, I would recommend upgrading your video card first and foremost.. especially since it's not even the Ultra version.

You would see a huge increase even going to a rather cheap card, like a 9800 Pro. If you can afford it, you may want to go for a Nvidia 6800 GT or an ATI X800.

For today's gaming, 1GB is preferred, but even 768MB isn't that bad. All in all, if you are playing Doom III , Far Cry and Half-Life 2.. you will likely see the biggest increase with a new video card.

[Baloh]

Thanks for the welcome.

Yeah, I figured this would be a card problem for most things.

I have doom 3 and run it on medium quality, Lineage 2 is also fine in most cases. I'd been thinking bout getting a new one, but don't know how much cash I'd like to deal out for it.

Still, there is a general "slowness" I experience when restarting/starting my computer, and when starting applications.

[Rob Williams]

Do you happen to know the speed of your ram? Also, do you defrag often? Especially if you don't have that much space free on your computer, you should defrag often. I defrag often, just to help it be that much smoother.

[Baloh]

Yes, I do defrag often, just did so the other day. Right now, I've only got 15gb or so of space used...recently cleaned some old stuff/files out.

How could I check my ram speed? I'm not sure I know that...really tired right now lol.

[Rob Williams]

You could download the free version of Everest Home Edition (http://www.lavalys.com/products/download.php?pid=1&lang=en&pageid=3) and do a report. It will tell you what ram you have. You could also use SiSoft Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/?dir=&location=home&langx=en&a=) to benchmark your memory, and compare it with others.

Good luck :)

[Baloh]

Memory Speed PC2700 (166 MHz)


That was taken directly from everest. Working on benchmarking it soon, will edit my post in a bit.

I've changed a few things, after running SiSoft's performance tune up wizard...some of which I thought I did after my last reformat, and some that I did not know about.

One thing that keeps occuring in it though, is that the bios/dmi info may be innacturate, which leads you to the website, but the link they provide no longer works, so where should I look to fix this?

Also, it suggests for quite a few things (5) that it would be better for the services start-up type to be changed from demand to auto, and says I can change this in control panel\services but there is no services option in my folder, where can i change this?

final edit: this has kept me up waaaay later than I wished to, but what my previous knowledge of computer basics has been increased tenfold with two simple suggestions...lol. I'll be working more with this tomorrow afternoon.

[madstork91]

Speakign from exp with games like Lineage 2 and CoH... Video card is where its at...

[ultragooey]

RAM, clean OS, and the right drivers and optimization for your vid card.