Should we replace Dim4500 or try to upgrade???

Question

Our one person office has a Dimension 4500 purchased August 2002. We run Windows XP Home edition Service pack 2 with 2.00 GB memory, 256 physical memory. Available physical memory 21.80 MB. Processor says x86Family 15 model 1 stepping 2 genuine intel 1794 mhz;It is getting very slow for our Quickbooks and on line banking. I feel it should be replaced but others think we can tweak it and speed it up. My experience with upgrading old computers has not been good. Is it more practical to upgrade or purchase a new one which would be considerably less than we paid for this one. We would stick to Windows XP as Vista has shown me nothing but a pretty picture and a wallclock widget I would like to have.

Davet50 · Answer

I really an honestly don't think that there is much more you can do to tweek that system. it is 5 yrs old and proably not really much you can update..   You could try to defrag the HD to mabe speed that up. Another thing is how full is the HD. the fuller a hd becomes the less space is available for the windows swapfile that it uses like extra Ram.. if the drive gets too full the swapfile will reach a point where window will actuall complain about it. Another thing is how many programs do you have running at once? Each program comsumes a certain amount of ram and if you really have only 21.8 mb left that tells me the windows is using the hd a lot.

x_lab rat · Answer

As above, you can't substantially improve performance of a 4500.  Even if you could, its reliability would go down, not up.  Replace.

shesagordie · Answer

ellenb3224

Time to buy a new computer. :)

Bev.

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ellenb3224 · Answer

I just called around for board approval and have already picked out our new Inspiron 530. Thanks for all your help.

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Should we replace Dim4500 or try to upgrade???

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