I Am Broke

[trugmolly]

Hi. This could help me. I got an old Athalon 700 pc. I am doing video editing.. cannot afford a new comp. I got a decent maxtor 80 gig hard drive. I am getting more memorey 156 right now... I know that is the first thing to do.. But if anyone out there knows of any tweaks of whatever to help my old machine I would be grateful.
What is the best memory to get ? and graphics card.. I am mostly using after effects and premier....
I know it is not much to go on...but any help would be appreciated

[shn]

What is your processor speed?

[trugmolly]

Its an Athalon 700.. with 160 ram and running xp and Me on another partition... Ntfs and fat 32..... actualy in defense of xp. Premier slows and crashes in Me but runs ok in xp....

[Keikan]

Athlon 700 doesn't tell us the processer speed

[trugmolly]

Just checked it .. its actualy a duron™ 701 mhz... the bios I cannot upgrade.. did try that but its a funny chipset.. pc chips....

[shn]

Yeah sorry didnt see that.

Anyway, what i would suggest is that you defrag it as much as possible, well frequently at least. Get a ram optimizer and free up as much ram as possible without disturbing or stripping away memory from other apps that you need to run. Keep your registry clean. Eliminate (disable) those unecessary system services that run in the background with xp.

And theres a lot more but its beyond the scope of this topic. Just gotta kind of ride it out I guess. Video editing can be very difficult on a slow machine, but if you close out most of your other programs while your doing it then that might increase the performance a bit as well.

Btw, I wouldnt spend too much on pc parts for that box if i were you. Computers are so cheap nowadays that by the time you upgrade your old computer you would have been able to buy a new with the money you put into it.

[trugmolly]

Cheers.. sound advice. I kinda had that in the back of my mind... prob just get memory for now that I can take to a new machine when I get one....These days its not even cheaper to build yourself.. three yrs ago this was a fast machine and peeps did plenty of digital work with much less.. I will struggle through for a couple of months .. Cheers

[shn]

Good Luck Hope it works out.

Btw, your right about the fact that 3 or 4 years ago that would be considered a pretty good pc. I was looking at a sales ad for microcenter the other day that was about 3 years old and there were 500 and 600 megahertz pcs with 32 and 64 megs of ram that cost 8 or 900 dollars some of them were in the thousands. I almost coudnt believe it. Imagine another 3 or 4 years in the future what the next breed of pcs will have.