Old HDD vs new SSD

[BK-NIGHT]

I got an old Windows vista machine with

 

1. Dual core 1,6 gHz socket 775 processor
2. Idk which motherboard
3. 2 GB of ddr2
4. Hdd with 50mb/s read & write 240gb storage
5. Nvidia geForce 6200SE with TurboCache^(tm)

should i buy a sata ssd or should i just leave it as it is

 

(it has SATA)

 

[Enderman]

It would still make the PC much faster.

[GoldenLag]

Like shooting yourself in the foot. And the pain would be the ammount of improvement you get.

[Spotty]

14 minutes ago, BK-NIGHT said:

(it has SATA) 

When I read the specs I was actually questioning whether it would just be IDE

I'd get the cheapest SSD you can, like a 120GB Kingston A400 for $20. But, I'd also probably install a lightweight Linux Distro on it instead of Vista.
Check eBay for some cheap DDR2 RAM. It's pretty cheap these days. Quick look on eBay and I'm seeing 2GB sticks for around $5.
Also, find out which model motherboard it is and what CPUs it supports. You should be able to find a really cheap quad core on eBay for under $20.

What are you hoping to do with the PC?

[Murasaki]

does it even SATA III? Eh still faster in any case..

[BK-NIGHT]

4 minutes ago, Mayushii said:

does it even SATA III? Eh still faster in any case..

probably not Sata III

 

[BK-NIGHT]

11 minutes ago, Spotty said:

When I read the specs I was actually questioning whether it would just be IDE

I'd get the cheapest SSD you can, like a 120GB Kingston A400 for $20. But, I'd also probably install a lightweight Linux Distro on it instead of Vista.
Check eBay for some cheap DDR2 RAM. It's pretty cheap these days. Quick look on eBay and I'm seeing 2GB sticks for around $5.
Also, find out which model motherboard it is and what CPUs it supports. You should be able to find a really cheap quad core on eBay for under $20.

What are you hoping to do with the PC?

A little bit of gaming and some work for school

 

 

And no it is not an IDE i got an older HDD from 8gb that got IDE

[Spotty]

Just now, BK-NIGHT said:

A little bit of gaming and some work for school

 

A 1.6Ghz dual core 775 socket CPU and a GeForce 6200SE is not going to be able to run any modern games, not even light titles like CSGO or League of Legends...

What motherboard is it? Can you check the motherboard to see if it has a model number printed on it? Or take a photo? If you're lucky it might support some Core2Quad CPUs.
 

[LukeLinusFanFic]

 

9 minutes ago, BK-NIGHT said:

A little bit of gaming and some work for school

 

 

And no it is not an IDE i got an older HDD from 8gb that got IDE

Idk man. Do you like pain? Because you'll be lucky to run cs 1.6... you won't be gaming on that.

 

As for some schoolwork, put Linux or chrome os on that baby and if it's still not fast enough, a 120gb SSD for 20$ is a good investment. I just bought three. 

 

But don't expect any amazing performance. And clean it up and open it if you can.

[NunoLava1998]

Get a Core 2 Quad or Extreme, 8GB of DDR2, a 250GB SSD and a GT 1030, if you ever remotely plan to do gaming or schoolwork without wanting to get lynched.

[mariushm]

You'd probably get significantly more improvements just by adding another 2 GB of DDR2 memory.

The TurboCache is just another fancy way of saying the nVidia driver uses a portion of your regular memory as video card memory, if a video game needs more memory than what's on your video card..

The cards have 32, 64 or 128 MB of ram on them, and they can "borrow" 128 or 256 MB of memory from computer to make them look like they have more.

 

A SSD may not be happy because your motherboard won't have SATA 3 ports, and the sata controller may not support some features like NCQ , TRIM  etc which some SSDs expect to exist.

If would not spend money on a SSD with that hardware.

 

Also, find out the model of motherboard you have and then look at the list of supported processors for it (go to mb maker's site, find model, go to support/downloads and you find there list of supported processors)

You're likely to find a much faster processor on eBay for something like 10-30$... depending on your budget it may be worth it.

[BK-NIGHT]

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

A 1.6Ghz dual core 775 socket CPU and a GeForce 6200SE is not going to be able to run any modern games, not even light titles like CSGO or League of Legends...

What motherboard is it? Can you check the motherboard to see if it has a model number printed on it? Or take a photo? If you're lucky it might support some Core2Quad CPUs.
 

here is a picture of the motherboard

 

[mariushm]

Sticker/Label between CPU socket and RAM tells you it's 945GCT-HM

Google tells you it's made by ECS for HP, here's the official page: https://support.hp.com/th-en/document/c00910113

 

Page says the board supports max 2 GB of memory so you can't upgrade ram, sadly.

As for CPU ...

 

 

Quote

 

Motherboard supports the following processor upgrades:

• Core 2 Duo (Conroe) up to E4300
• Pentium D (Presler) up to 960 (3.6 GHz)
• Pentium 4 (Cedar Mill) up to 661 (3.6 GHz)
• Celeron D (Cedar Mill) up to 365 (3.6 GHz)
• Celeron D (Prescott) up to 355 (3.33GHz)

 

• It makes no sense to use anything than core 2 duo so your options would be only E4200 which you probably have now (since it's 1.6ghz) or E4300 which is running at 1.8 ghz
• makes no sense to buy cpu for just 0.2 ghz extra

... so no, you'll be better off upgrading to something more modern... that board is too old and limited in upgradability.