Advice on a possible upgrade

[IG-88]

Been a while since I've posted but I'd like to run this by you all. I got an old Dell OptiPlex GX150 from a small business that needed a bunch of spyware/virus crap removed from it. Well I tried for 3 days with all the "high power" apps at my disposal along with spending hrs in the registry deleting said crap but to no avail. It still has freakin' pop-ups and whatnot on it. So I told the guy that I needed to wipe the HD and re-install the O/S and he says just keep it!

So I got a this thing and it has a 700mhz cpu, 10gig HD, 64mb ram, on-board video and sound. From what I've found on the net I think I can upgrade too a 1.4ghz cpu with an adapter but for most MAME games would this even be worth the trouble let alone the $$? I'll of course add more ram (max's out at 256 from what I've read) but would any of you do anything else? I'm not even sure a new video card would be worth the trouble of diabling the onbaord video. What do ya think?

[Crazy Cooter]

It looks like you'd need to jump through some hoops to do that cpu upgrade:
http://home.nc.rr.com/dhsieh/Upgrade-GX150.htm

I'd just toss in some add'l memory and run with that.  For "most" MAME titles, that will be fine.

[Apollo]

Well I don't imagine you will be running XP on it so you don't need any more than 128MB Ram really and you would probably be ok with 64MB for say a "classics" project.

[MnMCaputo]

I would slick the harddrive, install xp or os of choice and up the ram to the 256 max, thats about it, theres no point spending around $100 to upgrade that, when for about $200 you could get a better computer with double the speed, memory, and upgradeabilty

[IG-88]

Agreed. What about the video? The on-board should be sufficient right?

[MnMCaputo]

onboard video should be enough being that mame is done through processor power, not video card power

[IG-88]

That's right, I had forgot.

[IG-88]

Actually it looks like I can go up too 512mb of ram. So I'm looking at either a 256mb stick for apporx. $35.00 or 2 for $70.  256 with XP as the O/S should be enough shouldn't it?

[MnMCaputo]

256 is enough when you disable a lot of the processes that run in the background of xp that you dont need, as well, as well as when you set it for performance, not appearance

[IG-88]

OK. What processes do you recommend shutting off by the way? Is that hard to do? Is that something I can do from msconfig?

[elvis]

Agreed. What about the video? The on-board should be sufficient right?

There are known issues with Intel onboard chips (i810 and i815 in particular, but some of the older ones too) and rotation of vertical games in MAME when in fullscreen modes.  For some bizzare reason the intel drivers try to re-rotate the image automagically.  I don't know if this has been fixed in their latest driver release, but it caused some issues a few months back.

If you find yourself unable to rotate vertical games correctly, then try a standalone card.

[MnMCaputo]

for the services, right click my computer > manage > services and applications > services  now stop and disable   alerter, error reporting,  messenger, protable media serial, remote registry, smart card, task scheduler, telnet, universal plug and play and if your not using wireless you can also select wmi performance and wireless zero
then download this
http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?option=com_remository&func=sellang&iso=en
and run it, that should be good enough, putting a check mark in all the features you want disabled

[IG-88]

Great. Will do. Do you have any advice for W2Kpro services that I can shutdown on one of my other systems?

[MnMCaputo]

2000 is not my strong point, i'm sure theres some stuff out there, google it, see what happens

[paigeoliver]

I can't think of a single reason to run XP on THAT system for MAME. It makes no sense.

If you install Windows 95 OSR2 and Mame .55 it will run them all full speed with no upgrades at all.

[Bloinkxp]

I agree with Paige.  That platform is well supported for Win98SE.  I know that XP has loads more appeal, but it will not make as good of a mame station. 

Most people will argue that not loading services and tweaking XP will make it run faster.  This true to a certain extent.  It's just that the services that are running are more intensive than the parallel XP processes (TCP Stack/OS Kernel...ya da ya da).

Good luck with freebie machine!

-d

[IG-88]

I can't think of a single reason to run XP on THAT system for MAME. It makes no sense.

If you install Windows 95 OSR2 and Mame .55 it will run them all full speed with no upgrades at all.

Got to use what I got. Wouldn't have an old copy of W95 OSR2 that you might want to part with do ya?

[Wyluli]

Yes, if I were you I'd just toss in RAM up to 256 and put on Windows 95 OR Windows 98 second edition.  I'm planning to do this with my old Pentium 450 mhz machine.  I had it running at one time (but the video went ka-puut) and it ran most of the games just fine, no problems at all.