wilkes

It totally isnt a waste of money, and like chris said, you get what you pay for. I get more satisfaction from building my own than buying pre fab.

For 20 dollars you can a 3 year replacement guarantee. Considering E machines is owned by gateway computers its the best of the cheap deals going. Or you waste money tiring to upgrade a P4. Your choice..

[QUOTE]168 + tax
free ship to store

http://www.walmart.com/ip/e...i/21670068

[/QUOTE]

Being it's refurbished its more at risk to fail again. That's the only reason it's cheap plus the fact that it's an e-machine. You pay for what you get at wal-mart or any other retail store.

168 + tax
free ship to store

http://www.walmart.com/ip/e...i/21670068

AHHHH okay awesome! I was totaly misinformed about that. You would think they would add an edit feature huh? heres one for you, what are the most important components to upgrade to improve overall system performance? Also, if i were to just go cheap and replace the hdd and max out my ram (i think max is either 1g or 2g, it only has 2 ddr slots) then would it be worth the time and money to convert to sata and run a larger hdd? what would you say the ideal hdd size would be with out loosing performance but at the same time not overkill or wasting money on useless memory

I forgot to add in the previous post, and I can't edit it because there's no EDIT feature, but being the 2400 is an old computer the motherboards BIOS will limit the size of the HDD to 500GB max for an IDE device; however, you can purchase an IDE to SATA adapter for around $10 I believe, that will allow bigger HDD's to be used.

The motherboard has no part in what size HDD you get only what connection you can get that the motherboard supports such as IDE or SATA. As far as the sound goes, try this link and see if it'll help you. http://en.community.dell.co...x#19569309 .

thanks,
Chris

Im going to think about what type of system i want to build today then maybe this evening or some other time this week if your not busy maybe you can help me select what parts ill use. That way ill know the general price range im looking at. I really appreciate your help by the way.

Hmm. Thats whats hard to decide. I may as well spend a couple more hundred and build my own but at the same time i dont want to spend the money, but after being there before, once i start ill want to keep pushing it like you said. Ill probably end up useing this tower and building my own like you suggested. But untill im readyto do it ill by a hard drive for the time being just so ill have some other than this god forsaken samsung tablet. So it dosent matter what size hdd i get just as long as it is IDE? I thought it was dependent upon what the mother board can support. As far as my sound goes, i can install one of the intel factory drivers and get the sound working but its not the correct driver, the computer wont recognize anything for the sound..... there was something else very strange about it but i cant remember what it was.

I used to have an old p4 system a while back that I custom built myself; note "this is before the c2d chipset came out." I used an msi motherboard with a nvidia 8800gt with 4gb of ddr2 800 gskill ram. The hard drive is totally up to you on what size you want to get while only being able to use the IDE hdd's. The sound part can be fixed with correct drivers providing it hasn't totally went out, or just buying a cheap pci sound card.

Also if your wanting to completely start from scratch and build a new build for performance it all comes down to what your going to be doing with the computer. Are you going to be an extreme gamer? How about doing video editing? Are you wanting to run dual monitors, or have more than one gpu in your case? The possibilities are endless, but you have to decide on your own budget. I just built a custom pc last month *Note this is the one I'm using now as we speak* for $800, but I kept my same case, monitors, psu, and etc. I replaced the motherboard, gpu, cpu, bought a ssd + a 1tb hdd. I could of went cheaper and probably spent around $500, but I known that I wouldn't of been happy with it because it would be bottle-necked because people can say what they want, but your going to want to see what you can push with your PC, and when you can't push what you want to push, then your going to want to go spend money to be able to push it. I also built my PC this way so that I could be of ease and not worry about it needing to be upgraded say next year for example. If your wanting to go the next step, I would recommend jumping up and spend around $500, and see what you can get with that. If you can keep some of your same parts, you may get out cheaper.

Let me know if I can assist you with your purchase(s).

Thanks,
Chris

Chris, if you were being forced to keep and make due with this pc, what kind of work would you put into it to make it decent with out replaceing the motherboard? Now on the other hand what would you suggest if i were to decide to build for performance? Im still comtemplateing. Other than the hdd and the sound part of the chipset everything seems to run good but then again the system is old and it could be unstable. Regardless on what i decide to put in it, I need it to be dependable and not be shooting flames out when i get home one day. Lol

Oh yeah chris and everyone else, Gstoker1 and THE_Stoker are the same person.... yes i am both and both are me. Sorry, hah.

well it depends on the ammount of stuff i can do to it with X ammount of money. I can get a new hardrive off ebay between $20-$40, some new and larger ram can come from ebay to for a pretty low price. That alone should have it running smoothly, so now its on to the infamous chip set. This computer will mainly be for photo editing and web surfing. so while the chip set may be sufficient for what ill be doing on it, I would like to get a half decent graphics card atleast, it can even be used aslong as it functions correctly. So put it this way, i want to do as much as i can to it with out spending so much that i could have bought a new one lol. Any idea what types of graphic cards are compatible with my 2400,s motherboard? I know the pc aint no cadillac but with a little tlc dont you think it would be a solid, reliable pc? I think i should add some sort of sound card to, befor the pc crashed it would recognize the sound hardware with-in the chipset, the dell websites hardware analysis and driver/software install tools wouldnt even find the sound hardware!

Being the computer is so old and uses the p4 chipset you won't be able to do much without spending a lot of money to replace the parts.

How much are you willing to spend on this computer to upgrade it?

Thanks,
Chris

Okay, so i have a dell diminsion 2400 and the harddrive has pretty much croaked. I really dont want to buy a new system so ive decided to just replace the hdd with a new one and maybe do a few upgrades... my question is what size hdd? How big would be to big? Also, What other parts do you suggest replacing or upgradeing? I know its an older pc but win. Xp is fine with me and the pc can easily handle the tasks i use it for... .