Would adding RAM to this old PC be worth it?

[seanmcq]

Built a PC about 4 years ago and it served me well, but I haven't used it on a while because I bought a laptop for work and have been using that. Recently I've started using it again and found it to be a bit "sluggish". It isn't a good spec by today's standards:

PC Chips M848ALU SKT A SIS 748
Sapphire Radeon 9600PRO 128MB
AMD Athlon XP2800+ Processor Skt A 333FSB 512kb Cache Socket A
2 x Crucial 512mb DDR 333MHz PC2700 Memory Module
Hitachi Deskstar 180GXP 120GB ATA 7200rpm 8mb Cache

I had a look, and an extra GB of RAM would cost about £40. Would it be worth my while? As I said, I don't use it too much and would play the odd game on it (obviously nothing new), and have got a pretty high spec laptop, so I'm not really interested in spending too much on it.

Thanks
Sean

 

[Ehimen]

That's certainly a suitable amount of RAM for that computer spec. Depending on what games you'd play on it, you probably won't notice much difference. Most games that require 1gig of RAM would also require a faster processor and possibly a newer graphics card. There are certain exceptions, MMOs often need more RAM than their FPS/RTS counter-parts of the time.

It's pretty much down to whether or not you want to spend the money. It certainly would help, but only noticably in particular situations.

Hope this helps,
-Em

EDIT:

Apologies, my mistake - didn't see the "2x" first time round. Having 1gig in there is more than enough to be honest. If it were me, I personally wouldn't spend the extra money on the memory, it'd be rare to find a game which runs on that spec that needs more than 1gig of RAM. Of course, I'm not sure what else you use it for; although I can't think of any applications that require that much RAM running on a socket A-aged chipset.

 

[seanmcq]

Thanks for the reply Ehimen.

Games aren't really the issue, the only ones I would play are Max Payne 2 (years old) and SWAT 4 and both run fine. The sluggishness is mostly on boot. Seems to take an age to load up once it hits the desktop screen. I have disabled everything I can in Msconfig. Then booting into apps (even Firefox), I hear the hard drive going and takes a while to open. I guess I've just got used to my Dual Core laptop with 3GB RAM and notice it a lot more now!

Didn't think RAM would make it fly or anything, but wasn't sure whether or not it would be worth sticking it in. I did contemplate sticking in a new processor aswell, but then I would need a new mobo, new processor and then probably a new hard drive (SATA as opposed to my old ATA) and I was going to get all that, I might aswell just plump for a new machine and as I say, I don't really use it enough for it to be worth it.

It serves me well for what I use it for, was just hoping I could give it a bit of a "boost".

Cheers

 

[Tedster]

you have 1gb of ram, more than enough for a 4 year old system. Your bottlenecks are your entire system. I wouldn't spend a dime more. If you need speed, you're going to have to get a new system.

 

[seanmcq]

you have 1gb of ram, more than enough for a 4 year old system. Your bottlenecks are your entire system. I wouldn't spend a dime more. If you need speed, you're going to have to get a new system.

This is what I assumed.

Thanks Tedster.