So, I have a Sony Vaio desktop with a Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz

I currently has 512 Ram, and a 60 GB hard drive.

I store a lot of pictures and music on my PC, and have notice that it is moving SLOW as hell. In the properties its showing 89% of the hard drive is full.

On newegg.com they have 1 GB memory cards on sale 45$ for 2 GB(2 1G cards)

Would it be worth it to upgrade? Also, they have a 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive on sale for 41$

So, 90$ roughly with free shipping. Would it be worth the upgrade? Whats the max a Pentium 4 can run? For 10$ more I can get a 25o GB hard drive...is it worth it....HELP!

 

If your hard drive is 89% full, you need a bigger hard drive worse than you need more ram - but in reality, you need both.

The best and easiest solution is an external hard drive, move your pictures and music over to it.

My preference is a "build your own" external. I use this housing:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817362002

Put the biggest SATA drive in it that you can afford, I recommend you stick to Seagate or Western Digital. This housing may appear expensive, but you get what you pay for. It's high quality - aluminum, not plastic, and has a cooling fan - and it comes with software that can make images of your main drive for backup purposes. It's also better from a warranty standpoint - if you buy a prebuilt external, you only get a 1 year warranty, and if the housing fails, you void the warranty if you open it up to attempt to remove the drive to recover your data. With this housing, you can buy 3 or 5 year warranty drives and swap them in and out all you want.

I would not buy a generic ram upgrade from Newegg. Sony is a very proprietary computer, and you should buy guaranteed compatible ram. I recommend you use the configurator at www.crucial.com. 2gb is a very good number these days.

 

x2

 

You need both. Purchase your RAM from here www.crucial.com

 

I'd suggest moving the pics and tunes to CDs or DVDs. If you don't have a writer, get an exterior one that plugs in USB style. Also look in your startup for KernelFaultCheck. If it's in your start up- there's yer problem. If you are running XP, I can almost guarantee you have it running. Disable it. If you don't know how to find it or disable it, download the free WinPatrol and do it that way. I won't have a computer without Winpatrol. It makes things so easy and it doesn't let anything load to your start up unless you specifically okay it. You can disable in the start up programs like Adobe, Real Player, etc that don't have to run in the back ground. they're still there and still come up when you need them but they aren't taking up resources.

http://www.winpatrol.com/download.html

But get the pics and tunes off of the hard drive and onto a data carrier like CD/DVD. And besides, if the hard drive crashes you'll lose everything unless it is on CD/DVDs.

 

Is winpatrol kind of like Spybot S&D??

 

I would recommed more RAM, but a larger hard drive as well. External hard drives are awesome. The price of them has dropped a lot.

 

RAM never hurts. 2GB is all youll need and im pretty sure your standard xp wont recognize any more than that.

get your hard drive cleaned up quick. i believe once you get around 10% of its rated capacity left they start acting up and your computer will crash. its best to get an external hard drive if you dont regularly burn your media to disc. easier to access and you wont have to be flipping through cds to find what you want.

not a bad idea to defrag the old drive once you get the new one installed and the old one cleaned up.

 

When shopping for the bigger drive make sure you can use what you get. If it's external and USB 2.0 it shouldn't be a problem. If it's internal and SATA you should make sure you have a motherboard that supports SATA or you'll have to go with IDE. Anything new will have SATA but an older P4 board may not. Do you have a model number? If not just open the side and look for a SATA port.
Same goes for ram. Make sure you know what you need and order accordingly. Don't get DDR2 if you can only use DDR.