Q: I have a Dell Dimension 3000 from 2002, it just got cleaned up this winter and I take very good care of it. It has a 37.24GB HD, 2.39 GHz 512 MB of ram. I think it needs a boost, what should I get for it? P.S. I have a budget of $150.
A: 1 GB is the maximum amount of RAM it will handle, and with DDR RAM, it won't be as much of a "boost" as it would on a newer computer. You can't get a much faster processor, either. A hard drive might offer an incremental boost in performance, especially with a large cache size. Unfortunately, your board wouldn't have SATA connectors on it, so you'd have to use an IDE drive, which is slower than SATA. My advice would be to save up your money for a newer computer. You could through almost as much money into this as a new computer, and it still wouldln't perform well.