Hi I'm looking to add just one thing to my old pc to optimize it / speed it up a little bit when opening up documents or for the most part surfing the net. I don't use the old PC for anything else but surfing the net. I have already maxed the RAM but if you had to pick one, which would you add to an old PC with Windows XP and only 20GB hard drive and 256MB RAM (already maxed out)....a 2nd bigger hard drive (say 40GB more or 80GB more) or a video card with 128MB or 256MB memory? I have been told both can help but which one would you root for in this situation? Again, I wouldn't be using this PC much for anything but surfing the net...as it is today it takes quite some time for the browser to open up, etc.
To the experts: Which will help speed up my old pc a bit?
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meat_helmet
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If you got a new hard drive then you could transfer all your data files to the 2nd one and use they original just for windows. If the 20GB is near full then it can slow windows down i think. A new video card will not help you much with waht your doing though.
ivan chaos
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i suggest a better processor if you can get a better one
aaronkupen
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I would say don't even bother spending money on that system. But if you MUST spend on it I would just say go with a bigger hard drive, but I do think that spending money on that system is pointless.
Law
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15,000 RPM SCSI hard drive. Which will probably be worth more than your computer. 
if you could post the *full* specs of this old system we might be able to suggest something but its very likely there is little you can do hardware wise. I full expect a new hard drive or graphics card would have no noticeable impact on the type of performance you're talking about.
With that little RAM the best thing you can do to up your speed is strip down windows to free up as much RAM and processing cycles as possible. Alas unless you're very competent you're likely to cause more problems than you solve by dong this. The sort of things I'm referring to is stripping the start up items to the bare minimum, turning off visual effects (animations, shadows, backdrop) -the easy part. and stripping down services that you don't need -the harder part.
You can of course also do things like clearing up junk with ccleaner and de-fragmenting your hard drive .
There are plenty of guides to doing this sort of thing on the net, I'll see if I can dig you one up.
With that little RAM the best thing you can do to up your speed is strip down windows to free up as much RAM and processing cycles as possible. Alas unless you're very competent you're likely to cause more problems than you solve by dong this. The sort of things I'm referring to is stripping the start up items to the bare minimum, turning off visual effects (animations, shadows, backdrop) -the easy part. and stripping down services that you don't need -the harder part.
You can of course also do things like clearing up junk with ccleaner and de-fragmenting your hard drive .
There are plenty of guides to doing this sort of thing on the net, I'll see if I can dig you one up.
peterhuang913
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