Fixing up an old PC for a friend - HW advice needed

[Steve Macleod]

Hello,

I am fixing up an old celeron 633 for a friend to use to browse the
Internet, play some (older) games and use office etc.

After buying an old pc for a couple of bob, 'upgrading' the graphics card
(to my old radeon 7000 series card) this is the current spec:

Jetway 993AN Rev 1 motherboard
Celeron 633 / 128 / 66 / 1.65v
64MB PC100 (SD RAM, I assume)
Sound Blaster 16 PCI
Radeon 7000 series w/ 32MB RAM
20 - 48x CDROM
Fujitsu 6GB HDD (EIDE, Data Transfer Rates: 33.3MB/s (UATA),Physical Pins
of Data Connector: 40pins,Average Access Times: 11ms, Buffer Size: 256K,
Rotational Speed: 5400rpm)

I have installed Windows ME (the only OS I had available).

As you can imagine the current performance is quite poor. What I would
really appreciate, is if someone could advise me with regard to what to
upgrade first to get a quick performance gain, as Im going to put a little
cash into upgrading the system.

At the moment the performance is quite slow, even with the Radeon GFX card,
and you can notice the vsync with windows redrawing etc.

much appreciated!

 

[Wayne Morgan]

It depends on how much money you want to put into it. More RAM would help a little,
another 128MB should cost too much. The other item may be a new hard drive and hard drive
controller card to get UDMA 100 out of it. Anything more than that probably isn't worth it
when you consider what you can get a whole new system for.

 

[Steve Macleod]

Thanks

Im bidding on 256 133 SDRAM from ebay for £10
and ill look into the hard drive + controller.

Another question (it its OK)

Im getting crackly sound with the system also. I have the latest motherboard
drivers, and soundblaster 16 drivers. Do you have any idea what could be
causing the bad sound quality (I have checked the windows settings and the
speakers)

 

[kony]

Hello,

I am fixing up an old celeron 633 for a friend to use to browse the
Internet, play some (older) games and use office etc.

After buying an old pc for a couple of bob, 'upgrading' the graphics card
(to my old radeon 7000 series card) this is the current spec:

Jetway 993AN Rev 1 motherboard
Celeron 633 / 128 / 66 / 1.65v
64MB PC100 (SD RAM, I assume)
Sound Blaster 16 PCI
Radeon 7000 series w/ 32MB RAM
20 - 48x CDROM
Fujitsu 6GB HDD (EIDE, Data Transfer Rates: 33.3MB/s (UATA),Physical Pins
of Data Connector: 40pins,Average Access Times: 11ms, Buffer Size: 256K,
Rotational Speed: 5400rpm)

I have installed Windows ME (the only OS I had available).

As you can imagine the current performance is quite poor. What I would
really appreciate, is if someone could advise me with regard to what to
upgrade first to get a quick performance gain, as Im going to put a little
cash into upgrading the system.

At the moment the performance is quite slow, even with the Radeon GFX card,
and you can notice the vsync with windows redrawing etc.

much appreciated!

That's low-quality motherboard, may be nearer the end of it's lifespan
already. I wouldn't put a lot of money into the system at this point.

I'll second the suggestions made by Wayne. It can only use
low-density PC100 memory, so add at least one 128MB module. Also a
new 7200RPM HDD would help a lot. Likely the board only supports
ATA33, but I wouldn't even spend $ on an PCI controller unless it's
necessary to support a large HDD, as the motherboard may only support
up to 32GB with original BIOS, or perhaps up to 128GB if a BIOS update
addresses this limitation.

You might try disabling the non-essential eye-candy in WinME, a
Celeron 633 should be plenty fast enough to draw the GUI unless the
sluggishness you observed was due to insufficient memory, swapping
to/fro the hard drive.



Dave

 

[Steve Macleod]

Thanks for the reply.

I was thinking of buying 256 /133 SD RAM. Does the board support this? (you
mentioned that it only worked with older 100 boards)

-I cant seem to find any documentation for this model motherboard.

 

[Steve Macleod]

would it be worth upgrading the processor to a celeron 1ghz?

(aswell as the memory to 256mb / 133 ddr, and possibly a new 20 gig hard
drive)

 

[As mellow as a horse]

First of all, PC133 is not necessary and may not even work.

Secondly, the going price for 256mb of any type is about £20 depending on
time of day and other factors. I've just sold some PC133 for £24.

If you haven't already, get the ATI drivers rather than using Windows
built-in ones.

For the sound, try muting the aux and mic and whatever else you don't use.

 

[As mellow as a horse]

A celery 1000 will set you back at least £20 on ebay.

You can't use DDR memory (!) just PC100 sd-ram. Your celery only runs at
66fsb. I used to have a celery 300 that would do 450 with no problems at
100fsb. And a P3 650 that was overclocked to 867. Clearly your celery
could be doing 800mhz which would help a lot.

Even a 2nd hand working 20gig drive will go for over £20. I recently mugged
someone for £20 for a 7.5gig model (although it was 7200rpm).

It just goes to show what other people had said that it's not really cost
effective to upgrade an old system.

But you can also do yourself a favour by changing that mobo, and it needn't
cost the earth. I'm about to sell a brand-new soyo P3 board with ATA100,
built-in Savage 4 graphics and decent sound, for about £30. You could find
a much cheaper used one that would likely be far better than what you have
(although I don't know that boar to be honest).

Most of your probs are driver related I'm sure (that gfx card is OK-ish with
the right ones). I was using my P3 650(867) until quite recently and it was
nippy enough for most stuff. Certainly no lag on redrawing, even when I had
a savage 3d card (far worse than a Radeon 7000!).

 

[kony]

would it be worth upgrading the processor to a celeron 1ghz?

(aswell as the memory to 256mb / 133 ddr, and possibly a new 20 gig hard
drive)

The common PC133 memory sold today is higher-density than your
motherboard (chipset) can support. The lower-density PC133 memory is
VERY rare, I suggest you seek PC100 memory, which will cost more.

I'd be surprised if you can even find a "new" 20GB HDD. It might be
new as-in, new-in-box/unused, but still old technology so
significantly slower and poor $/capacity than a modern higher-capacity
drive.

Thinking along the lines of adding 128MB of memory, that's a low-cost
upgrade so minimal money gets sunk into that old system with little
chance that the (part) could be reused someday. The HDD might be
resused though, so it's easier to justify, and old drives may more
likely fail at any time so it's a good practice to replace a HDD at a
certain interval anyway.

Beyond those two upgrades, I'd replace the motherboard before anything
else. Any newer motherboard will support less expensive, faster
memory, usually larger HDD support, faster IDE ATA mode, faster CPU,
AGP 2X, etc. Then there's the issue of power supply adequacy and
case cooling... There's not a lot you can do to that system before it
becomes worthwhile to replace the whole thing. If you can find a
slightly newer motherboard that accepts high-density PC133 memory,
especially a used (but still good condition) it might practically pay
for itself by allowing use of the cheaper high-density memory. If
you could find a motherboard that supports Tualatin Celerons,
all-the-better, then you have a reasonably-affordable upgrade path to
a 1.4GHz Tualatin Celeron... Not modern performance but significantly
faster than a 1GHz Celeron and about the most performance you might
get without replacing the power supply too (unless you have an
unusually good [for that era and system], high-capacity power supply
already).

If replacing the memory doesn't get rid of the GUI sluggishness, I'd
try updating the Via 4in1 driver, the ATI video driver, disabling the
WinME eye-candy/effects.



Dave

 

[philo]

Thanks

Im bidding on 256 133 SDRAM from ebay for £10
and ill look into the hard drive + controller.

just adding ram to the machine mught really be all you need to do...
i;d hold off on the controller and hd until you see how the extra RAM
does

 

[DaveW]

More RAM, which is relatively cheap, will get you the best performance gain.
Add a 256 MB stick of RAM and watch it speed up.

 

[JT]

Hello,

I am fixing up an old celeron 633 for a friend to use to browse the
Internet, play some (older) games and use office etc.

After buying an old pc for a couple of bob, 'upgrading' the graphics card
(to my old radeon 7000 series card) this is the current spec:

Jetway 993AN Rev 1 motherboard
Celeron 633 / 128 / 66 / 1.65v
64MB PC100 (SD RAM, I assume)
Sound Blaster 16 PCI
Radeon 7000 series w/ 32MB RAM
20 - 48x CDROM
Fujitsu 6GB HDD (EIDE, Data Transfer Rates: 33.3MB/s (UATA),Physical Pins
of Data Connector: 40pins,Average Access Times: 11ms, Buffer Size: 256K,
Rotational Speed: 5400rpm)

I have installed Windows ME (the only OS I had available).

As you can imagine the current performance is quite poor. What I would
really appreciate, is if someone could advise me with regard to what to
upgrade first to get a quick performance gain, as Im going to put a little
cash into upgrading the system.

At the moment the performance is quite slow, even with the Radeon GFX card,
and you can notice the vsync with windows redrawing etc.

much appreciated!

1. Get lots more ram. Add at least 128meg. This will have major benefits.
2. Dump ME. Either get 2k, XP(and at least 256meg ram) or go back to 98SE.
You don't want him running on your copy, and ME has the worst of all
windows performance.
3. If you actually could see the Vsync, your monitor refresh is way to low
what you are probably seeing is the pause when the system has to use
disk for virtual memory.

JT

 

[stacey]

would it be worth upgrading the processor to a celeron 1ghz?

no



Before you spend anything other than a little more ram, build a newer
machine. BTW I never see screens being redrawn on a celron 300 I have here
so sounds like a software/bloat problem.