Q: I have a 6 or 7 year old Dell Dimension 4600 with the following: Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3 Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.40 GHz, 2.39 GHz 768MB RAM 80GB Hard drive, 5.3 GB Free NVIDIA GeForce4 MX with AGP8X CD-RW Drive DVD-ROM Drive Original Dell keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers. Inte; PRO/100 VE Network Connection Adapter SoundMAX integrated Digital Audio SRS Audio Sandbox (WDM) EVERYTHING on this computer is original except I added 512 MB of RAM about a year ago, all memory slots are full. What is worth updating because it looks like I will be stuck with this PC for a while It still runs fast and like new believe it or not, but I need to know what is worth replacing because I am sure it wont run fast forever. Great at playing high-graphics games, but can be a little jumpy at times. Has had a few virus attacks in it's life so far, trying not to let that happen again
A: The specs on this machine are actually as good as many modern laptops. You need a new hard drive though. A good rule of thumb is that when your hard drive is 3/4ths full, you either need to clean up some space, or get a new hard drive. After that, if you're looking to upgrade, find out how much memory your motherboard supports (I realize the slots are full, you'd take out the modules that are there and replace them with higher capacity ones - how much higher depends on what the motherboard supports). Your graphics card is probably about as good as you're going to find, considering AGP isn't in use anymore. If your motherboard has a PCIe slot though, look into getting a newer PCIe graphics card. After that you'll be about as well off as you can expect to be as far as performance - any kind of significant processor upgrade would also require a new motherboard - at which point you've paid the bulk of the cost for a whole new computer.