A PC`s lifetime

Question: I have a 6 year old PC (HP with AMD Athlon XP processor). I use mostly to read news and to e-mail. Should I buy a new computer for trading or this is enough for swing trade?

 

It still has enough horsepower for swing trading.

Is your data end-of-day? Hourly?

 

I would plug 1gig of RAM to it and empty a hard drive to speed it up a little.

 

Thanks guys!

My trade would be based on end-of-the day.

 

On my 5 year old PC at home, I just swapped out the original 30GB hard drive for a 160GB for $40 and reinstalled XP on it.

The performance improvement was remarkable. My wife said it was like I'd given it a brain transplant. Mostly I think it's due to going from having 15% free space to 90% free.

A couple of years ago I upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. Again, it was a noticeable improvement.

Newer processors aren't really faster. Even though my PC is 5 years old, it's still a 3GHz machine. New PCs are about the same.

 

As long as you got at least 512 ram and your not running Vista your good.

 

i dont like to go over 3yrs on original hardware... if a new pc isnt your budget you should most definitely purchase a new HDD...

 

Be sure to reinstall your OS. Makes a HUGE difference.

 

I know that with XP the registry does get bigger and more convoluted over time. I really don't think these registry cleaners are worth it. A clean re-install is best.

 

That is quite wrong. There is a LOT more to performance than just clock frequency.

Recent CPUs are much faster than a five year old pentium.