Windows Vista Upgrading my CPU on freshly installed Vista

[Weasil-b-23]

Hello people,

I'm new to the forum and was looking for a bit of help, i currently have Vista Home Premium (had Ultimate but lost the product key and MS is useless..) running on Intel Celeron 2.53GHz CPU. Runs fine no problems with Ultimate but with Home Premium it lags every now and then and can be annoying.

Its due that i upgrade the processor anyway however theres only so much you can do with a 478 socket.. i've looked at a few 3.4 and 3.2 pentium 4's with HT and 1MB cache, will these provide me with a noticable perfomance boost or not?

A problem i had with Ultimate is i upgraded a few things and Ultimate didnt recognise this, thought it had been pirated and diabled itself, will this happen to Home Premium when i change the processor?

all help is appreciated

 

[kemical]

Welcome to the forum..
Personally I'd buy a cheap AMD dual core system, which you could get for very little outlay..(I'm not sure you could even buy a socket 478 processor?) The lag you describe is probably due to RAM and fitting more would help.
You don't say what exactly you upgraded so I can't really comment on that unless you can be more specific..

 

[Weasil-b-23]

To be honest i don't really want to upgrade to another computer, i'm just making this old one a bit better.. unfortunatly it has a 2GB RAM limit, and as far as processors go a Pentium 4 is the best it can handle.. all i really want to know is if the new processor will run Vista smoother than my Celeron, and if Vista will acknoledge it as an upgrade rather than Vista being copied to another HDD and being used in another computer.

I also know that its not the RAM causing the lags because i've installed vista on a computer with 1GB of DDR PC2700 RAM and it ran fine, that same PC had a Pentium 4.. however that was a while ago and i do believe that PC had more video memory than my PC.. Vista ready ATi Radeon X1650 512MB AGPx8 card on its way so that might affect my computers performance in some way

 

[kemical]

Ok no worries... Well if it's a more powerful CPU then it will help although I'm not really too familiar with Intel set-ups. Usually 2GB is easily enough to run vista so as you say it can't be the RAM.. Also I don't reallt see any problems with you just upgrading, vista should except the new processor just fine..

 

[Weasil-b-23]

Thanks, Il post back once i've actualy bought and installed the new processor..

 

[Weasil-b-23]

Both graphics card and processor arrived and have been installed. Apart from a somewhat worrying install, Vista accepting both upgrades and is running better than ever. I'm using a stock Intel fan and heatsink and its managing to keep a 3.2GHz Prescott cool. thanks for your help Kemical.

 

[kemical]

Great stuff... If your not so bothered about having the latest and greatest nor playing the latest games at some amazing resolution then there's plenty of hardware about for setting up a simple system....