Dell dimension 2400 Upgrade quesion

[-RockMan-]

In about 3 to 4 days from today. I will begin working at home for a company in boston massachusettes.

My mother is giving me back the dell that was meant for me when we bought it 2 years ago.

My new Job NTI wants my system to be quick enough to handle its software and Vista business edition or Ultimate. they will send me a free copy in the mail when I begin.

My dell has a 2.40ghz celeron and on this site they say my system should handle a p4 socket 478 northwood prescott at 3.0ghz- 3.2ghz HT if my dell frontside bus can reach up to 533mhz where exactly can I find this processor ?

http://www.dellupgrades.com/servlet/DellPages

also I'm looking at Newegg.com for a strong and stable cpu should I go for a Pentium D, Celeron D (if it is s478 compatbile) or just go for HyperThreading technology ?

Newegg.com - Buy Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more!

also when I was in college 2 years ago the p4 HT they had in their system were quite stable but it would slow down from time to time and I'm guessing that was do to 256 DDR being in there pc's

Any help and guidance would be good

 

[b1gapl]

Pentium D is not compatible with socket 478. This would be your best bet:
Newegg.com - Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Northwood 2.8GHz 512KB L2 Cache Socket 478 Processor - OEM

Can't you rebuild a new system from scratch? Socket 478 is outdated. You can build a new system, for not much money, that will perform better than that Dell.

 

[bleeckkk]

You can find the processor at newegg but I'm not sure a northwood can be a prescott but anyway I wouldn't recommend running vista on that. You're going to want 2GB of fairly fast ram (PC4200+) and a fast 128mb (at least) AGP8x GFX card, although I would recommend 256+mb PCI-E. Vista is very hardware demanding.

 

[peterhuang913]

and remember its a dell, not all processors with "compatibility" will work on a dell

 

[-RockMan-]

Ok so the first link I posted was not clearly accurate right ? I had a feeling that some of the cpu's listed on that site were not totally legit thats why I wanted to come here and ask first. also later on this year I plan on building a good pc, its just over the past 2 tries I either got screwed over by faulty motherboards or incompatibility with cpu's and mobo's.

Thank you for the help I will be upgrading the ram to at least 2gb DDR.
I do have 1 concern, when I was looking in my dell's bios it said I had 386 ddr 2700 however xp pro corp (which is a genuine copy) said that I only have 376 DDR, is that xp's fault it can't read some memory right or is it a system problem which might mean I have to upgrade the bios ?

 

[bleeckkk]

Might be onboard gfx, i'm pretty sure you need 128mb (at the very least) gfx for vista business/ultimate.

EDIT:

# 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
# 1 GB of system memory
# 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
# Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:

* WDDM Driver
* 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
* Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
* 32 bits per pixel

Windows Vista: Recommended System Requirements

 

[Trotter]

Your best bet would be to gut it. 478 is beyond dead.

You have two real options, AMD or Intel.

AMD:
Newegg.com - MSI K9N6PGM-F Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
Newegg.com - AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane 1.9GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor - Retail
Newegg.com - G.SKILL 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail
Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3250620AS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Intel:
Newegg.com - MSI 945GM3-F LGA 775 Intel 945G Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
Newegg.com - Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale 1.8GHz 2M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - Retail
Newegg.com - G.SKILL 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail
Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3250620AS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

AMD = $256 + shipping
Intel = $307 + shipping

You'll be getting Vista for free.