Help Me Pick A System For My Wife.

[Frags]

My wife has an old desktop, put together by me. It has an E2180 processor and onboard video and a beats the hell out of me motherboard. 2 gigs of ram. Anyway it has been years since I built a computer and I am not sure that I want to build one and so purchasing a system is good by me too. Oh, it has Winxp pro on it. 

Ok, she games. Facebook Zanga games which run flash. She uses firefox to play them. The problem is that she gets error after error and the games respond slowly. I am getting to the point that I think the antique computer she has just can't handle the games. On top of that she gets all kinds of crap on that thing mainly due to XP....... Oh, I am an XP hater. Give me 64 bit Win7 any day of the week. I digress..

 so, what I am looking for is a system that can run those type of games easily and costs the least amount of money. I know, I am being cheap. If you don't have any experience running those games don't bother to comment, they hog up more resources than you think. Now, my Asus Laptop G73 rips right through them. There must be something in between a full blown gaming computer and a bottom end POS that will run them. Any ideas? DjMot???? 

Thanks.

Frags.

Oh, yes, I know how to keep the critters off, and keep it cleaned up. It is just an antique pos......

[TecHnOBoY]

The specs ate ok for surfing or playing some Flashgames. We recently had problems on some office PCs which became slow like hell. A benchmark showed that there was an HDD write speed down to 3MB per second.

 

I checked the hardware - nothing. HDD ok, Board ok. I re-installed windows: BAM! 80MB per second.

 

Oh, and I have a test running:

Win 8.1 on a Notebook with a Centrino proc and 2GB RAM. Runs fast like hell! I didn't expect that. Win 7 was very slow on this machine..

 

I think there is no need for you to build a new one.

 

 

We use this tool for a fast diagnosis:

http://novabench.com/

It's free.

Edited July 5, 2013 by TecHnOBoY

[7Toes]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7710289&Sku=A50-G1102 look at this price is good and she can beat your but at gaming

Edited July 5, 2013 by 7toes_ky

[Frags]

Thanks Toes,

 I don't think she needs that! She can already beat my butt at farmville as it is.

Technoboy, thanks for the link, I installed it and actually found two problems. One pretty bad. It reported that the computer had 1gig of ram. Uh...........I could have sworn I put two in. So, I popped the side of the case off and looked inside...Two sticks of 1 gig ram.....hmmmm one side of one stick was not pushed in all the way. So, I had a 2gig stick of higher quality ram I put in and viola! It runs like it should no errors on her games, but the games were a bit slow still, but she was not getting flashplayer errors and that sort of thing. When I ran novabench it gave me this for the gpu: Pixel Shader 2 (-50%) and stopped the test. After I clicked on ok it finished the test. Then when it gave me the results it said that her computer was putting out 12 fps on the 3d test. Hmmmm Updated drivers, no good.....My Asus does over 300fps on that same test. So, I think she has something wrong with the onboard video card. It is a 256 meg card. I think I am going to put a 1gig card from newegg and install that. I bet all is ok then. Actually even with the low gpu performance the games still played ok, not too bad at all, but I bet a video card working properly would help out. Thanks for the help. You saved me some money, and way more money than you know if I got divorced over this stupid thing.....LOL the bleeping computer is all my fault you know!

[KaptCrunch]

Frags   i'd  reset the bios by remove power cord and hit start to drain power

 

then reset CMOS  reason for it OS can see other ram and reconfig video ram  

[Frags]

Crunch, 

 When I put the new ram in there was something that popped up like the cmos and asked if I changed the ram, I said yes and the system saw the new ram. I ran novabench afterwords and it was working. So far so good. There have only been a few errors in the last couple of days. Nothing like it used to be.

[gingersnaps]

ther is a lot u can do i spent 300 on a pc 2 week a go u got a lot of parts with old 1 so use what u can like hd,cd rom,power sp, u just have to pick right mom bord.

i got 3 pc this year 420$ 318$ 280$ all bilt my self so ez now no jumpers ect u use micro center.com they beet new egg 

any qustions hit me up 

sep for 280$  

4100 amd 4 core 4 g ram 80 ghd 400w pwsp biostar mb

sep 318

6330 amd 6 core 4 g ram 400w pwsp asrock 970de3 250 hd

420$

8350 amd 8 core 600w 16 g ram 1tb hd  asrock 970de3

now rember i used som old parts off a xp pc that just stoped working the asrock 970de3 has pada so i could u old cd roms and hd 

sorry cant spell at all lol

[gingersnaps]

ps my wife had same problm slow farm vill ect new pc did help but vid card extra!!!

[gingersnaps]

did new card work?

[Frags]

I did not bother with a new card. changing the ram and getting it properly seated did the trick. The rendering from the onboard video is a bit slow but the computer runs fine and does not throw errors now. So, to my wife its all good and thats all I care about.

[gingersnaps]

lol if she not happy no 1 happy lol

[Nobodygood>XI<]

I always build a new one for me and my wife gets the hand-me-down, we both are happy with that