Hi Nozoned.
There are a couple of things to consider here. First off, and we'll come back to this at the end with a recommendation or two, is the fact that Vista is pretty memory hungry. 1GB is what I consider the absolute minimum for a 'usable' amount of memory with Vista, but even with perfect circumstances it's going to be pretty slow. Second, given that it was a kid's PC, it may have accumulated some 'junk' just from that type of use. Not that anyone was trying to gob the PC up, but a lot of typical installs will piggyback junkware like the 'Ask Toolbar', etc, and occasionally some genuine malware/spyware as well. So it would be prudent to do a full scan with Spybot (free download), as well as perhaps a new trustable virus scan from something like NOD, Panda, or Avira. Most of the OEM Antivirus products such as McAfee and Norton/Symantec are pretty substandard, as well as being 'trialware' which only works for 30-90 days before expiring. To add more difficulty, some of the more ambitious security apps such as 'Norton Internet Security' for example can be very memory/resource hungry.
So do the scans, and use the control panel interface for removing any unneeded/unwanted/useless apps/games.
After that, hopefully you will have a nominally useful workstation. Sadly, the best you can hope for without any upgrades is still going to be pretty slow to work with. So, here are some recommendations that will greatly help :
(1)- Memory. Nothing will increase performance quite like getting some more ram for a borderline system. Your system has two DDR2 240-pin memory slots, and will run ddr2-533 and ddr2-667 speeds quite well. I don't see support listed for 2gb sticks, so getting 2 1gb ddr sticks would probably max you out. Going from 1gb to 2gb of ram on Vista makes an extraordinary difference, even more so when it's on a system with shared video such as that. DDR2 prices have risen lately, but the good news is that you can still find 2gb kits (2x1gb sticks) from vendors such as newegg for less than $50.
(2)- Processor. That Celeron 420 was designed as a low-power mobile cpu, and it performs pretty poorly under any reasonable circumstance. Getting info on that model was pretty difficult, but apparently people have used the Core 2 Duo 4xxx series with no problems. I wouldn't recommend trying anything newer due to the i945 chipset and the lack of higher FSB support as well as 45nm voltage support. So, look for a Core 2 Duo E4xxx series 'Allendale', which is also a 65nm processor. Performance will be dramatically higher than the Celeron 420, but remember that without upping the ram to 2gb, you will still be in pretty bad shape.
(3)- Hard drive. If you do the above upgrades, and want to cement things with another quality upgrade, look at a 1TB Western Digital Black Edition drive. The very high areal density, 32mb of cache, and great drive electronics make this a very fast drive. Data loading, transferring, and saving will be hugely faster. Windows will boot faster, programs will open more quickly, and so on. The 120GB drive that came with that unit is probably only 30% of the speed, even though both are 7200rpm. Remember, even with the same spindle speed, loading data off of two 60gb platters is hugely slower than loading data off of two 500gb platters, which is why areal density is a tremendously important specification to look at when comparing hard drive performance.
(4)- Windows 7. It really does perform better than Vista. If you're starting this unit over fresh, and are willing to wipe the existing install (and have all of your desired applications available for reinstall), then this could be a very rewarding step. I'd even hazard to say that with the existing 1gb ram and Celeron processor that it would make for a decently usable system, given the performance of Windows 7 on Netbooks with Atom processors (even slower than the Celeron!) and 1gb ram.
Best wishes, Ark
