I've got a 5 year old computer that runs fine but I'm interested in bumping up its performance since we have 1000's of pics and searching through them while doing other things seems to be taking longer to process. I've already doubled the size of my HD so there's plenty of space and maxed my RAM so all else being equal, would I notice a difference in performance if I upgrade the chip from the processor it came with:



Pentium dual core E2180: 2 Ghz / 800 FSB / 1 mb L2 cash



To this:



Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 Ghz / 1.333 Mhz FSB / 6 MB L2 cache



My motherboard will only allow certain intel chips:

*Intel Core 2 Duo E4x00 up to E4400,

*Intel Core 2 Duo E6x00 up to E6700

*Intel Core 2 Duo E8xxxx

*Intel Core 2 Quad up to Q6600

*Intel Core 2 Quad Q9xxx



The Core 2 Duo 8500 I want to upgrade to is $144 and I'm trying to spend under $150. I know these are all old chips, but I'm new to tinkering so would I even notice a significant difference in how it runs? Thanks computer wizards.

 

You would notice a substantial increase in performance from this chip, IF it will run on your computer.



Try $50.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trks...at=0&_from=R40

 

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/68?vs=55



If you got so many pictures id be backing them up to a external hard drive first, other things that can slow down your pc is all the crap start up processes next to the clock and all the crap on the desktop ,remove and clean them up and also check the mb of your desktop background image as most people use snaps from their 10+ megapixel camera's without resizing them so a huge amount of ram is wasted starting up.



PC Pitstop OverDrive is online pc benchmarking utility



http://www.pcpitstop.com/betapit/ = run OverDrive anonymously.