Upgrade my hardware

[breezen18]

I have a Pentium 4 @ 2.8ghz

The spec sheet says I can have up to 4gb ram (4 slots available)

It says I have 2 IDE connectors & 2 Sata connectors.

If I upgrade the ram to the 4gb & get a 200gb SATA HD,

will that make a pretty decent computer to use Windows 7 on ?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Christopher]

Yes, you will be alright. I would look into getting a standalone video card as well. Doesn't have to be much but it will help take some of the weight off of the rest of your components.

 

[breezen18]

I have a nVida GeForce FX 5200 presently

 

[gforce23]

I have a Pentium 4 @ 2.8ghz

The spec sheet says I can have up to 4gb ram (4 slots available)

It says I have 2 IDE connectors & 2 Sata connectors.

If I upgrade the ram to the 4gb & get a 200gb SATA HD,

will that make a pretty decent computer to use Windows 7 on ?

Thanks for your help.

Couple of things to remember -
1. You'll need the 64 bit version of Windows 7 to take advantage of 4GB RAM.
2. Since you have 4 slots, it's very likely that the motherboard uses dual channel configuration for RAM. Be sure to check out the motherboard manual to put the RAM sticks in specific slots to eke out a little more bandwidth.

I'd suggest getting 2 gigs of RAM and putting the rest of the money on a decent graphics card, if you don't have one already. Something like a GeForce 6xxx or Radeon 9800 should be powerful enough for basic tasks and play older games.