DescentBB

First off, someone I know is having a problem getting windows explorer to work all of a sudden. Heard that it just returns an error message and no longer opens. Its on Windows XP btw. Anyone heard of that happenening, and if so, what can be done about it?

And secondly, i was planning on upgrading my 500mhz AMD k6/2 to an athlon XP with at least 2.0 GHZ. Is there anything else I would need to ugrade before the CPU, like a new fan? I'm not sure if the current fan could handle any extra heat from the new processor or not.

Any suggestions?

If youre going to upgrade from a k6/2 to an athlon XP youre gonna need a whole new motherboard, heatsink/fan, and ram. You cant just stick that kind of a cpu on to a socket 7 motherboard.


You might as well just build a whole new system. ll the new hardware youll need would be too much of a hassel. Plus whatever videocard you have in that thing would be a major bottleneck.

I don't believe there is an upgrade path for what you're talking about. You'd need new everything practically.

Bummer... oh well.

Other than an XP, is there a smaller upgrade I can do without much hassle? Like 1 GHZ or something? D3 plays a bit too slow on my comp and ive been needing some sort of upgrade. Already have 390MB of ram and a 32 meg geforce 2 (which i will prolly upgrade again).

...But anyway, anything else i could upgrade that would help?

a K6-2 500 is pretty much the end of the line for that computer. It's a socket 7, and they stopped supporting that a long time ago. I suppose you could get a K6-3 550, but that's such a small jump, and even that's extremely slow by today's standards.

Even if you upgrade the video card, your CPU isn't going to be fast enough to drive it. Basically, a new computer is the only way to get more power.

Yeah, it'll be cheaper to change out the mobo, CPU and RAM than to do patch jobs on an already VERY out-of-date computer. Hell, PC100 and PC133 ram are just about twice the price of DDR of the same size.

You should be able to change out the major components (CPU, motherboard, and RAM) for a tad bit less than $300.

Hell, my jump from a 700MHz AMD Duron to my XP2800+ (changed out mobo, CPU, RAM, and Power supply) only set me back just short of $400 total, but thats taking into account that I went with half a gig of PC2700 (333MHz) via two sticks of 256 (which costs just a little bit more than a single 512 stick, but I wanted dual-channel mode enabled. ) The power supply (380W) tacked on $50...and it was the only component that had a s/h tag on it to, which added another $15 to the total price. I also went with retail parts, which only added a few more bucks to the total, but the extended warranty on the CPU was well worth it.

Oh well, so much for that. Guess i'll just have to wait a while longer.

Thanks for the info though.

Upgrading my system also set me back all of about $400 when it was said and done. I replaced the CPU, RAM, mobo, case and power supply. Months later I replaced the video card with a $400 dollar video card which effectively doubled the price and quadripled the performance of my system. I had enough money to get that video card because the rest of the system was so inexpensive, and I got such a performance boost because the old geforce3 was holding the system back.

I upgraded from a 1800+ Athlon XP (1533 MHz) overclocked to 1650 MHz / 512 PC2700 RAM / vanilla GeForce3 to an Athlon XP 1700+ T-Bred (1470 MHz) overclocked to 2405 MHz / 512 PC3200 / Geforce FX5900 Ultra. You can get a lot of performance these days for not much money, I used to have a K6/2 400 MHz system, I have upgraded 3 times since then.