Upgrading hardwaresoftware

SQ

Fan? Unless someone's done some custom mods, it probably has at least 3 loud fans in it (one loud fan in the PSU and two really really loud fans in the CPUs). I'll bet they're all ball bearing fans which have by now become worn-unbalanced enough to make serious noise.

If you want to free yourself from the horrific noise, head

The "sweet spot" for price-performance right now is maybe an Athlon64 3000 (Venice core, socket 939). Athlon64's also run cooler-quieter than Pentium's.

The performance? It depends on what you do, but many things will be over twice as fast.

You've got the raw processor speed, which is over twice as fast (400+400mhz vs 1800mhz). For single threaded applications it'll be well over four times as fast.

More important for many applications is Front Side Bus speed, which is 66mhz vs 400mhz--MUCH faster. Also, RAM speed for DDR is much faster per cycle than SDRAM. For applications which shove around a lot of memory, image editing, a new computer will simply blow away your current one.

You may get only a small performance boost from your hard drive(s). SCSI always was faster than IDE, so your upgrade might not boost drive speed so spectacularly. For browsing files, you might not notice such a big improvement. In particular, disk seek speed improvement may be underwhelming.

Finally, a computer upgrade won't make web pages download any faster. You'll find web pages render quicker, with scrolling and other things feeling more responsive, though.

Isaac Kuo