If you have a Pentium 75, any upgrade will be dramatic.
If I were you, I'd wait until after the announcements due on April 2nd and the later product and pricing announcement reportedly coming on April 15th. The reports are that a P2/266 chip will be down around $200 by May 1st. You may have to wait a bit longer for this reduction in CPU prices by Intel to filter down to whatever channel you use to make your purchases -- it may also take longer for this "trickle down" to occur if you buy a computer than if you buy raw parts and build your own systems.
Based on the reports, I am also planning an upgrade in this time frame, I will probably build a system rather than buy one (I have NEVER bought a system, have always built my own from parts). My plan has been to probably go with a PII/266 and an ATX form factor 440LX motherboard (leaning towards the Abit LX5). However I want to see what the BX chipset will have to offer, and how much of a premium I will have to pay to go with a 350MHz PII and a BX motherboard, which would give me a 100 MHz bus instead of a 66 MHz bus. Also, as yet I have not actually seen any AGP graphics boards offering the I740 graphics chip, so this is a "wait" also.
One final factor, now I am considering waiting until June 25th for the release of Windows 98.
I will also put in 64Mb of memory, but in truth, 32Mb would probably perform as well except that I do some advanced audio editing (I spend a lot of time making my own music CDs from my vinyl record collection), and the files run 30-50 Mb, it's nice to be able to have enough memory to hold a whole track in memory. However for "normal" use, I doubt if there is any measureable difference between 64 Mb of memory and 32 Mb of memory. |
