Members zarquin Posted February 9, 2005 Members Share Posted February 9, 2005 in my experience ( doing tech support etc) the biggest thing that slows down computers is spyware, adaware and other useless programs that run in the background adding "features". a celeron 2Ghz+ is fast. think about it. 4 years ago people were still excited about having clock speeds of over 1Ghz, and my celeron 667 at home is still more than useful. The biggest problem with XP is ram. make sure you have a fair bit. 512Mb is (as pointed out) a reasonable minimum. you also want a fast disk for swapping. (and if you can be bothered fiddling, set the swap area to a fixed size. 1Gb should be fine. This will reduce the time that the OS spends trying to calculate how much swap it needs and then growing and shrinking the swap file which makes the computer chug) Also, we're talking about windows, and computers in general here, there will be times when things just hang for no reason. *shrug* it happens As for OpenOffice, my mum now uses it on here celeron 300 laptop. once she worked out how to save as a word document she was happy. Though t sin't 100% compatible with all office files, so it might pay to check that it can do the specific task, but its worth a shot if it can save you ~$200 or so... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wes-ninja250 Posted February 9, 2005 Members Share Posted February 9, 2005 Is a 2GHz celeron "fast enough"? Good Lord, yes. I'm still running a Cyrix M6 366 at work.. I won't let them upgrade me because it works JUST FINE and I have a LOT of software installed on it (it would probably take a week to rebuild from scratch). I run mostly MS Office (heavy on the word and excel) and browsers, but have a number of esoteric dev environments I used once in a blue moon. Of course, I keep the box free of crap. If the option exists, halve the CPU and double the RAM, the box will run better for what you want. Delete the blue E, install firefox, use a recent version of Windows, don't install anything you don't need (by accident or otherwise), and things will be fine. Wes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members GigMan Posted February 9, 2005 Members Share Posted February 9, 2005 Originally posted by wes-ninja250 Is a 2GHz celeron "fast enough"? Good Lord, yes. I'm still running a Cyrix M6 366 at work.. I won't let them upgrade me because it works JUST FINE and I have a LOT of software installed on it (it would probably take a week to rebuild from scratch). Wes Hmmm... let us know when you're going to join us here in the 21st Century, Wes... ha ha! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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