Desktops: Upgrade or New?

Replace

Your old computer is probably not worth upgrading. Certainly not if you buy the memory from Dell. One of the advantages of buying new is the warranty, you will be able to talk to Dell about problems instead of having to fix them yourself.

Also, a four-year old desktop is going to be old enough that you may start having problems with the hard drive, CD-ROM drive, etc. It is always nice to have a new system that is more up to date.

Don't worry about losing your files, you can take the old hard drive out of the old system and use it in an external case and still have access to your files.

(NT) His system uses RDRAM....it's real expensive

(NT) Me too on the 'new vs, upgrade'.

New

RDRAM is expensive as hell, and it's no worth spending $300 on an obselete technology. Also, it's not worth spending $300 on a 4 year old system. I'd go with a new Dell.

I'm in the same boat

I have an 8200 too and the memory from Dell is way too high. I'm considering buying it off of eBay; there are a number of vendors selling used RDRAM, usually for less than $200 a gig. Make sure the seller has an excellent feedback rating and is located in the US. A number of people have been burned purchasing computers and components from overseas sellers.

NO Pentium 4's!

I would highly consider going dual core. It sounds to me from your initial post (slow when switching between functions) that you run multiple programs at once. Even though some Pentiums have Hyper Threading (and some even dual core) I would suggest waiting for another few months for the quad cores to come to market. They are SIGNIFICANTLY faster and do follow Moore's Law (processor POWER doubles roughly every 18 months (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law )

The quad cores are totally destroying even the best of the Core Duos and Core 2 Duo chips. Even though there aren't any programs written for it yet.. Tom's Hardware stated that they felt like they were using a computer from the future.

I understand you may not need a top of the line computer.. thats what I suggest what earlier people said.. clean out, defrag.. possible even restore your computer with the Windows Disk (AFTER backing up all your information of course).

But Toms Hardware said that you can burn a DVD, listen to music, surf the internet all at the same time without and delays with the new quad cores. It's like having 4 processors in your PC.

PS - If you do get another computer let me know where your located, maybe I could buy that one for household / server usage..

re: Upgrade or New

I think you are right on the money in upgrading your memory. If the system is sluggish it is not because your processor is too slow or your hard drive to small, it is because you have too little memory. So, I would not buy a whole new system, instead add 1 GB of RAM. HOWEVER, the prices you were quoted sound OUTRAGEOUS. I just recently bought a 1GB stick of DDR RAM for #39.95 on ebay, stuck it in and it sped up my system tremendously. That's all you need. Maybe defragment the system, too and get rid of memory hogging programs. But anyone who is trying to charge you hundreds of dollars to install the memory is ripping you off. If you can't do it, pay a high school kid $20 to stick it in the slot.
Rainer