Is it worth it?

[Joe Shmoe]

My windows Me computer is really showing it's age especially now support is stopping. I have seen lots of windows XP laptops on special offer at the moment is it worth saving for one of them or would it be better to wait until the new windows vista ones come out in early 2007?:-D

[kepla]

There is a theory, which seems to be bourne out by practise, which suggests that each version of Windows nicely uses up the resources available on a typical machine at the time it comes out. If you are just looking for an excuse to treat yourself and buy something new then go ahead. If your concerns are that your current machine is running a bit slow then there are various 'maintenance' tasks you can perform to make sure it is giving you all the performance it should. If you have been a bit lazy keeping the hard drive with Windows installed nice and clean, over the past few years, then the chances are that a good defragging and registry clean-up will make quite a difference. You will also find that the cost of things like memory for your old machine is now so much lower that an upgrade represents a trivial expense. You could also consider adding a second hard drive to it - properly deployed this could enhance performance too. Finally, do remember that there are many other choices of op systems apart from Windows and these are mostly more efficient and therefore run faster. It will cost you little more than a bit of your time to try some alternatives and see what you think.

[deggers316]

lap tops look good but very difficult to work on or upgrade easy as the last message said there are many "free" progs you can download to keep things on your old comp running ok
get reg clean
& cc cleaner
and run defragment from disk tools

[Joe Shmoe]

Thanks for your answers Kepla and deggers316. The thing is I do do the maintenance thing regularly .I also use C Cleaner. Ad aware and Spy bot. and since I last had to format the hard drive keep whats on it to a minimum.:-D