Should I upgrade my computer or just buy a new one?

• I have a Dell™ Dimension 8250. It's about 6 years old and has 533 megahertz. It also has 4 slots for RAM and only two are being used at the moment. I only have 256 meg in the RAM and I'm in dire need for more. The unfortunate situation I'm in, is that my RAM sticks have a unique seed pattern, so I can't just go out and get more. I have to pay upwards of 600$ for a 1 gig upgrade. I was stunned, but I deiced I would look into it further. I call Dell and I get one of the people from India and he tells me that I have a very powerful computer capable of using it as a server. Also, he tells me that upgrading my RAM sticks would be much more effective because of how the RAM sticks are made. Now, should I upgrade or just get a new comp? BTW I do tons of online gaming. My computer has a very hard time running WoW even if it's the only program running. It tends to hit "huge" lag spikes and the entire time I play it's pretty choppy and isn't smooth. P.S. I have looked over many sites and everyone sells my RAM stick for about the same price give or take 5 or 10 dollars so, I doubt that I'm just getting ripped off. Also, is my computer just the older versions of the XPS? Because I'm pretty sure it is but, I was just curious. If you need to look at them here's the link http://www.4allmemory.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.memorySearch&model_id=-71

• Answer:

  Computers are outdated every 4 or 5 years if we are lucky, Since yours is 6 years old its time for a new one. Upgrading the memory will help but considering the processor power of a six year old computer you will not really see a major difference in game play. I had a computer that only had 512mb ram in it with a 5 or six year old celeron processor...I upgraded to 2gb of ram and barely saw a difference. The ram allows the computer to think quicker, but with a poor cpu that speed increase will not be good enough for you to be happy with purchasing a few sticks of memory. WOW can be played on many low end computers even without video cards. You can buy a low end home computer with no real ties to gaming and still experience WOW better then you already do....just because its newer. You do not need dual core processors or 1gb of memory to play most online games, unless you decide to play Call of Duty 4 or Doom3, etc....but even then you only need a good video card and a good single core CPU. My opinion is that you need to buy a new computer (depending on your money situation) with at least a P4 processor and 512mb of memory. This should be good enough to play WOW without any problems and it definitely won't break your budget. If you want to play COD4 or something I recommend getting dual core and a 1gb of memory with at least a geforce 8600GT video card. People say buy a quad core and 4 gb of ram...blah..blah...blah! You dont need that to play almost any game out there, I mean it doesnt hurt to have all that computing power, but it is definitely NOT needed. Search around but definitely buy a new computer. Check out my site for good computer at low prices: http://www.zero3computers.com