got a deskop for free.

[Joeyjoe9876]

ok so i went to my aunts house and she had two desktops, i asked her why and she said "the other one didn't work so i got another one". of course i asked if i could have it, and she said i could and if i found out what was wrong with it i could keep it
it's a Compaq Presario SR1130NX. my question is, is it any good? and how much can i upgrade it to get decent speed and gaming?
it has 2 RAM sockets. an AMD athlon XP processor which runs at about 2.21GHZ and has XP booted onto it.
not really sure about anything else. i just opened up for a quick peak and closed it back up.

 

[zeturi]

This gives you an idea on what you can upgrade with it. If you go to start, then run, and type in the command "dxdiag" you can bring up all of your system specs and see what you can upgrade.

http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/compaq ... 62676.html

However, I'm not sure if you really can use it for gaming. Any upgrades you purchase might end up making the cost of a newer PC. I'm not an AMD guy, so I know nothing about their processors at all. In fact, it's prolly better to wait for a repsonse from one of them smarties.

 

[samjc3]

i do all my gaming on an athlon. i used to have an athlon 64 5000+ and an nvidia 6800 le. (4gb, ddr2 800mhz)

now i run an athlon 64 5200+ 2.7 ghz (OC'd to 3.0) and an nvidia 9800 gtx. on this rig, i can run every game i own, just fine. some games can be a bit low as far as framerate, if i run em in real high detail. otherwise, its just great.

 

[robm]

I used to run pretty much that same setup.

Hated it.

I've always hated AMD, decided to give them another chance with that rig, ended up with the same result - unreliable performance and random blue screens for no apparent reason. Back to Intel - perfect, no issues.

 

[Joeyjoe9876]

i've always had AMD on my computers. on my moms Intel i got a lot of blue screens, and still get them periodically.

 

[ToastBucket]

You're doing it wrong, then. I've never bluescreened in my life. Not once. I use Intel.

 

[Twilight Wolf]

I've had plenty of BSODs with both companies, but primarily Intel. Plenty on our old Windows 98 with an AMD K8, plenty on all of our laptops with Intel processors. However, my Dad's AMD-based laptop has never had any problems, to my knowledge, and my unlocked Phenom II-based desktop has never had any issues.

Basically, it doesn't matter what company you pick, your mileage will vary.

Anyways, looking at that desktop's specs, it doesn't look like you can do a whole lot with it, gaming-wise. I think it could work well as a general-use PC or a media center or something, but gaming? Probably not...

 

[Joeyjoe9876]

hmm how about upgrading the Processor and stuff like that? all i know is that i can only upgrade the ram to 2GB

 

[samjc3]

if the mobo can only take 2gb of ram, it is probably bottlenecked in the same way in every aspect of upgrading.

 

[XCVG]

Does it have an AGP slot? If so, get an equally old graphics card and throw it in.

 

[J.D]

That's gonna maybe be able to run TF2 on lowest settings and that's it.

 

[samjc3]

J.D., then its totally worth it. xD but not really.

 

[Joeyjoe9876]

if i can't really upgrade anything i might just make a MAME cabinet out of it *shrugs shoulders and waits for palmer*

 

[Bibin]

If it has an AGP slot, you can get a *decent* video card and could likely run some games on it, possibly TF2.

 

[XCVG]

Build a MAME cab.