My computer is about to kick the can, at least I think it is. However, as far as computing capacity goes, it theoretically still has all I need as I don’t do much more than browsing, a couple games, and run a jukebox out of it. I got it 5 summers ago, before leaving for college, and it was top of the line, 2.33 GHz Pentium 4, 512 mbs of DDR Ram, a more than adequate sound and video card, my monitor is great, speakers are perfect. Basically, I am trying to avoid buying a completely new computer, and I am hoping that the only problem that is truly an issue is that my hard drive has essentially been turned on for 5 straight years, subjected to heavily downloading, and recently, because of negligence, come under attack from adware and spyware, with a couple viruses thrown into the cocktail for good measure I’m sure.

Do you think that scrapping my current hard drive and simply replacing it with a new one would essentially press the proverbial reset button on my computer and everything else will go back to normal? Search times are horrible, multitasking is virtually impossible now, and I don’t suspect it is because of RAM issues but that my hard drive is just fried. I am trying to avoid going the Apple route, but fear if I do need a new one, I will have to switch over to the dark side. How hard is it to reload XP onto a completely fresh hard drive? thanks in advance.

and be good to go.

A system with those specs is good for a while longer, esp. if you add another 512MB RAM to it.


The HDD is normally gonna work in binary fashion: that is, it either works or it don't. If you haven't been plagued with stability problems the whole five years then it's gonna keep on chugging till the day it quits...and even on that day, you can probably still get the data off of it if you didn't back it up.

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i would reformat the hard drive if it is slow (could be spyware). upgrade to windows xp if you haven't done so already. you have enough RAM but you could pop in another 512 if your computer can upgrade to that. only get a new hard drive if you want more disk space...

--
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