Not mine, unfortunately.

My uncle needs (or wants, I guess) to upgrade his PC. His PC is nothing breathtaking, but it is not a weak one, either. Here’s the complete specification:

  • Matsonic MS8147C+ Motherboard
  • AMD Athlon XP 2400+
  • 256MB DDR Memory
  • Geforce 4 MX 4000 Graphics Card
  • 30 GB Samsung Harddrive

He only has US$100 budget, so I found this to be pretty challenging. US$ 100 is a little amount of money in to be used in PC upgrading, especially if the technology is somewhat behind. If this PC already have a PCI-express slot, I can bring it back to game with US$ 100, but as this PC only have AGP slot, the best I can do is putting it into “Windows Vista Premium ready ” state.

Motherboard upgrade was ruled out on the first thought, as replacing the old socket 462 motherboard would need CPU and memory replacement, as well.

This PC will only be used for normal office work, so the processor is more than good enough. An Athlon XP 2400+ is already around 80% as fast as an Athlon XP 3200+, which is the fastest processor in its family, so upgrading it won’t give any noticeable performance.

Memory department needs some steroid injected, though, as 256MB of ram is barey enough to run Windows XP smoothly, not to mention the applications he will be using. So I opted for a 1GB DDR stick, from either Kingston, Elixir, Corsair, or maybe A-data. Note that they are all value memory, as this is a very budget-limited upgrade.

You can’t have enough storage space, so I decide to get an Western Digital 80GB Hard drive, which is a steal nowadays. But it is also kind of hard to find normal PATA drives, it seems that SATA has already taken over the market. SATA controller is cheap enough, though (not the RAID ones), so if needed, I can just get one and buy a SATA drive.

I am unsure whether to buy a graphics card or not, as this PC won’t be used for gaming. But if I can afford it, I’ll cram one in, Just to make sure this computer has Aero capability.

I will also add two fans, one for intake, and another for outtake, ensuring this PC gets enough cooling.

Well, that’s pretty much what I will do to the PC, and I really hope that it will bring noticeable performance improvement.