it can be a real pain to find out details about OEM motherboards, in the end its just a question if hunting around for, try using Belarc to see if this can give any more information , but in general you should not need to change anything in the BIOS, when we upgraded an Acer laptop from a single to dual core there was nothing to change, the only issues you might have are.

is the cooling system upto the job?, and will the extra power needed cause any problems?

Acer CPU upgrade details

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Hi everyone
I would love to speed up my pc without being duped into paying daft money by sales folk. Here are it’s specs - Dell XP home SP3, AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+, 446MB RAM, 2.4 Ghz, NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE. It’s my first time upgrading, so bit of a nervy newbie, would love know the names of the hardware I can ask for or better still order online. The goal is to up it’s multi tasking, iplayer, burning, downloading, and mainly start up, takes about 2 mins start up. I have avast and spybot residential which seem to be slowing the start up, but hopefully with better hardware this will nolonger be an issue. Any help and advice will be grately appreciated, thank you. Oh and i don’t play games on it, just basically when i click on something, id love it to not take 5 - 10 seconds loading :/ cheers, Dave.

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on the whole you have quite a slow computer, the point i’m making is the CPU cannot really be upgraded by anything much faster due to the limitations of the motherboard, next the hard drive will be an older slower type so even replacing this would not make so much of a difference as the bus speed of the motherboard is probably quite low, the next point is the RAM 446mb is very low for any operating system, you really need around 2gb which would make a difference to its speed.

so rather than upgrading too many components it would be more cost effective to replace the computer itself.

But otherwise upgrading the RAM is the first step

Also make sure that the computers hard drive is defragmented and chkdsk is run every week or so to help keep it running as well as it can

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Hi,

Thank you that’s brilliant, actually, to be honest I was hoping that wouldn’t be the answer. I’m surprised how fast PC’s have evolved, only bought mine last christmas and it appeared ok, speed wise. One thing I did noticed is when I upgraded the service pack to 3 the pc started having little siestas! Anyhoo, I’ll give the RAM a try then if it’s cheap enough, and I never bothered with the chkdsk, so I’ll do it now. Also I hate to be cheeky in asking another question, but is there any particular RAM brand I should look for online? Many thanks in advance,

Dave.

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The brand is not so important, just make sure you buy from a reputable seller such as crucial

Sil

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