Hey all, I am getting an old Pentium 166 with like 64 mb of ram, and was curious what kind of upgrades will I need to have it run halfway decent apps/ burn vcd's, etc. Any advice will be appreciated by this semi-newbie, in the areas of CPU/Graphics Card/Ram/etc.. Thanks a lot in advance

Pootietang

As my opinion goes I would say everything. Comps like that are only good for begineers, that don't know absolutly anything about comps. If you look at almost any Program or Hardware device the System specs must be at least 1½ times as powerful to run it as your PC is right now, unless it a really old program/device.


Note: this opinon comes from a entensive gamer.

bump

If you installed Win98 you might be able to burn cd's at a slow speed but really everything needs upgrading the only part that would be transferable would be the floppy drive and it's cable and thats it.

There's no reason why you cant surf the net with it.

You could use it for older games that won't run on faster systems or later OS's (E.g. XP)

Older apps (most of which are perfectly capable but with less 'eye candy') will run fine.

I would suggest that perhaps it's not worth the time or the expense to upgrade it though unless you're considering it as a kind of challenge in which case you'll need to know the motherboard make and model, ram type, gfx card make and sound card make, hard drive size and speed and so on...

Get yourself something newer (which I see from another post you are trying to do) and then use this one to experiment with to really learn what makes a PC tick. If you screw it up you haven't lost anything. They gave a bunch of old 486 and early Pentium PC's away at my wife's workplace and mine so I got about 6 of them ( some were just partials ) and took the best pieces from each and built a couple from the pile of parts as a practice run to building myself a "good" PC. I wiped the BIOS clean and brought them back from scratch, it was a blast except that I had to endure scowls from my wife since I had them spread all over the living room for about a week :o ! It also proved to be invaluable training for upgrading and maintaining the family PC and then building my son a decent 700 Duron machine from upgrade leftovers and bargain bin goodies.