New slow machine!

[baine1805]

Hi guys . I am almost 100 percent positive there was a better section for this post however i didn't wanna get flamed for actually posting in the WRONG section, so i just posted it here. Maybe yall can help me out. I recently sold a parts car i had and got a sum of money along with what i was told was a gaming rig. Now i've looked up the parts which i detailed below, and they are far from top spec. lol thing is, i'm still new to the hardware side and am not sure what these parts SHOULD actually be capable of. the guy keeps saying that the machine should be pretty fast and that i must be missing some drivers. I tried installing ATI catalyst to fix some graphics problems i've been having where my computer simply will not load certain games like black prophecy online. That didn't seem to do much. So maybe one of you who is more techy than me can help me out. Here is what the software i use says is in my pc lol.

Motherboard: TA790XE

Video Card : ATI Radeon X1950 (driver date 2-10-11)
512MB

RAM:2g DDR2

CPU: AMD Athelon II X2 240
2800.5MHz
Dual-Core 14x

Also, I should mention that when i got it i installed a custom version of windows 7 os. I use the eternity edition installer. So even though my computer says i have all my drivers it is entirely possible i missed something. As for a little more detail about what the problem actually is.....it's just very slow. Usually it's slowest when actually opening up an application. Once it's running everything seems fine...usually. My guess and yall can tell me if i'm wrong. is that I need more RAM.

 

[SNGX1275]

It probably was a gaming machine a few years ago, but its not going to be playing current games well. Still should be more than adequate for everything else though.

You are on the right track with more RAM. I'd try to get that to at least 4 (you won't be able to use all 4 with a 32bit Win 7 though), be careful about going higher than 4 - will need to check if your motherboard supports more than 4.

I debated about removing the eternity edition portion of your post, but I've decided to let it stay. We won't help much/at all with "pirated" versions of Windows. Maybe you have a legit key and used it with that customized version Anyway, just in the sense of 'piece of mind' I would recommend using a legit install of Windows 7 and then manually doing all the things you like about that version. I found this video of a guy reviewing it, and he provided a link to another vid where he tells you what registry edits were done (and I assume explains them). This will ensure you get what you want without the risk of having downloaded something that someone else slipped something bad into..

What games were you hoping to play? That CPU isn't super good by today's standards, but the good news (in this case) is a lot of games are getting pretty GPU dependent so you can still get by on some older CPUs if you have a good GPU. So you could upgrade your GPU pretty easily, and depending on what games and what resolution you were wanting to play, the chances of getting to what you want on your budget run from excellent to impossible.