hi, I'm very new to all this so please excuse my mistakes
my little lad wanted a computer for his bedroom at his mums for his birthday.
I managed to source a couple of old e520s from my work and after a little searching the internet for help I took the extra ram and spare hard drive from one machine and doubled it up in the other and ended up with
4 x 512mb ram
2 x 160 gb hard drives
windows 7 64 bit
he wants it to run minecraft online and football manager, along with watching youtube videos and general homework and internet surfing.
I tried an old version of football manager earlier today and it ran like a bag of spanners and was unplayable so I uninstalled it straightaway.
the windows scores are:
Calc p s 4.9
ram 5.3
graph 3.6
3d/gaming 3.2
hard drive 5.7
I have done a bit of research and mainly thanks to this forum I now have a few plans for improvements which I hope will have things running more smoothly..
- increase ram to either 5mb or 8mb if really necessary (will 5 suffice?)
- upgrade to a core2 duo e6600 dual core or e6700 dual core (again is there much difference between the standard core2 to the 6600 and then the 6700?)
- add a graphics card, maybe Asus ATI Radeon HD 5450 Silent Graphics Card (1GB, DDR3, PCI-Express) £25 on amazon
I am on a very tight budget but want the best bang for my £££ as I don't want him to lose interest due to slow performance.
what would you recommend from the above? my main concern is the graphics card as some need an upgraded power source, I also know I need a single slot due to the available space, but have no idea what sort of mb I need or if it should be ddr3 or ddr5?
or any further suggestions to speed things up? do I need larger hard drive as this will limit my windows score but not sure what effect this would have on the system overall?
sorry for the long first post but ive been going round in circles learning all these new terms and getting a bit confused with it all now :-)