If you really want to upgrade to Win 7, you can live without Aero, which is the fancy transparent windows effect. However, waiting to buy a new computer with Win 7 might be the smarter move. A Dim 3000 really doesn't have the hardware to take advantage of Windows 7 and might need expensive upgrades. IMO, it's not worth the $120+ price for the OS upgrade disk. Keep your Win XP and use it until you can buy new.
I love Dell computers on the whole, but at this point I've done what you are thinking about already. I had to locate and purchase a decent PCI video/graphics card and increase my SDRAM to 2GB. I've got a slave HDD with 320GB for storage since the drive my system came with is WAY TOO small. An option for the Windows 7 upgrade is to buy it on Ebay (cheaper than most retail stores) or look for a replacement for your tower. I noticed that BestBuy.com has a great refurbished tower (no monitor or keyboard or mouse) at their outlet site for around $400 but I cannot remember what brand it was. It had tons of memory, hard drive space and a good CPU
Mary G
4 Operator
•
20.1K Posts
0
September 29th, 2009 14:00
If you really want to upgrade to Win 7, you can live without Aero, which is the fancy transparent windows effect. However, waiting to buy a new computer with Win 7 might be the smarter move. A Dim 3000 really doesn't have the hardware to take advantage of Windows 7 and might need expensive upgrades. IMO, it's not worth the $120+ price for the OS upgrade disk. Keep your Win XP and use it until you can buy new.
rdbcatcher
16 Posts
0
January 28th, 2010 16:00
I love Dell computers on the whole, but at this point I've done what you are thinking about already. I had to locate and purchase a decent PCI video/graphics card and increase my SDRAM to 2GB. I've got a slave HDD with 320GB for storage since the drive my system came with is WAY TOO small. An option for the Windows 7 upgrade is to buy it on Ebay (cheaper than most retail stores) or look for a replacement for your tower. I noticed that BestBuy.com has a great refurbished tower (no monitor or keyboard or mouse) at their outlet site for around $400 but I cannot remember what brand it was. It had tons of memory, hard drive space and a good CPU
Hiphoptech
77 Posts
1
February 11th, 2016 21:00
jhbou,
The answer is YES!
Here is a video of my installation on the DELL Dimension 3000 which was sooo old it only had IDE ports and CD-ROM Reader [No CD/DVD Burner!]
Install Video XP > Windows 7 :