:confused:
Right now, my general computer specs are:

OS: Windows XP
RAM: 256
ROM: 20gig
CPU: AMD Athlon Proccessor 901mhz
Video card: Unsure, but plan on replacing.
Computer Model: Compaq 5000.

I cant get by with a new computer due to budgetting, but Im hoping to go with what I have and do some major upgrading. I need to replace the CPU and Video card mainly ( I think ), but I wanted to get some opinions from you guys on what I should do...? Anyone have any ideas of what would be best to run everquest? Given Im running all expansions and so forth on this machine.
Im not worried about looks, just souly preformance. So, anyone with any info or help will be greatly appreciated.

Ok, just going by the description you gave, you know next to nothing about computers, and this makes Baby Jesus sad.

First, you need more RAM.
Second, it's a hard drive, not ROM, and you need more of it.

Anyways, if you're looking at upgrading more than marginally from a 900 athlon, you're going to need a new motherboard too, and since you mention that it's a compaq, you'll probably need a new case. At this point it becomes cheaper and easier to build a whole new machine (except peripherals) than to try and salvage anything from the old box besides peripherals, and possibly your cd/dvd drives.

The only other advice I can really give is to not buy the absolute newest parts, since by the time they ship to you, they'll be $200 cheaper. Something in the area of a 2.0-2.5 ghz Athlon, 1 gig of ram, 120-160 GB hard drive (smaller than that gets more expensive, and you can find 160 GBs on sale for ~$100 almost every other week), and whatever new video card you go for (I like my Radeon 9600, but I'm itching to upgrade, even though I really need more ram)

Sadly, you cant just go out and buy a new CPU and plug it into your computer. You need a motherboard that supports that CPU, you need RAM that runs at the proper speed of the CPU and motherboard, and you need a powersupply to get the entire thing running. It must fit into a case that is properly vented.

I see computer shops around here advertise all the time, "Will upgrade ANY PC to a AMD 2200+ for $250." If they want to give you some quality parts doesn't sound so bad, get a decent chunk of RAM. Since Compaq is pretty notorious for making their computers as hard to upgrade as possiable, might just be better to let someone else deal with it. As far as video card goes, your wallet is the limit, you don't need to spend $300 on just a video card to play EQ though.

Honestly, anything that you could upgrade to with your current setup would still be pretty unplayable, and not worth the money. As the folks above mention, you need a new mobo, a new CPU, a new video card, new RAM, and probably a new case and power supply at a minimum. That will cost you $500 or so anyway. Put your money away into savings until you have enough to buy a complete PC. It needn't be top end, and you can get something better than what you have for $500 to $1000.

I don't know if you have the store Fry's where you live but, when your ready to buy a new computer go check them out. They sell stuff at a good discount. I purchased my last computer from them and, so far have been very satified.

If you want a really good PC for a reasonable price check out both Dell and Gateway (online) they are both great and give the best bang for the buck (although Dell's after sale customer service is far better).

If you feel the need to buy one from a store, check out Sam's and/or Cost Co, The Price Club Etc. They will have far better prices than Circuit City, Best Buy etc (of course they will also have far less service).

You will do yourself a big favor if you go to the library and read four or five issuses of magazines such as PC World, PC Magazine and PC Gamer before you begin to shop.

Scirrocco, is correct you can find an excellent PC in the $500 to $1000 range (by the time you buy a motherboard, cpu, video card and ram you'll be in that price range anyway and won't have a warranty) towards the end of the year (think Christmas Sales) there are some really excellent bargains.

www.dell.com

You can get a fairly good computer from there. Just get the standard on board graphics card and buy some other graphic card later, if you feel comfortable enough installing your own graphics card. Otherwise, save up some moolah and just configure a full system from Dell with whatever graphics card options they have.

My mother and I both have dells and neither of us have had any problems with them at all.

As others have said, once it's that old you might as well just get an entire new system. If you wanted to upgrade the processor you'd still need a new motherboard, RAM, possibly a new case and PSU etc. Those are just the essentials, then to take advantage of it you'd need a new graphics card and RAM.

If you don't have the cash right now you could always consider getting it on credit, but DON'T go nuts. I spent about £1100 plus £800 in credit charges on a new PC because it seemed like a good idea at the time (I'd just got my first full-time job, or that's my excuse for being stupid anyway), and boy am I regretting the repayments now. Save up if you can and get something decent :)

Two sites:

http://www.pricewatch.com/ and http://www.tomshardware.com/

Pricewatch will provide you with links to the cheapest prices and Tom's provides reviews on most of the hardware. BTW, most hardware carries a manufacturer's warranty that will cover the parts if they fail.

With careful shopping you can build a decent system.

Good luck,

Glidelph

I use http://www.newegg.com for computer parts and just build mine up from scratch, they are cheap, and have excellent service when it comes to damaged parts and such.

I have to give Gateway a huge black mark. I bought a PC from them one year, they shipped me the wrong thing. Their customer support was the utter worst and it was a hassle getting them to fix my order.

Buying locally is the best choice if you don't want to replace parts yourself. A local seller will inspect or replace parts for you in the future.

I do think now is a good time to buy a lower end PC since there is a glut of electronic stocks... as reported by Intel.

I like a site called Computer Shopper. You can buy the monthly magazine in the grocery story for a few bucks or look them up on line. There seems to be both a US and UK version.

http://shopper.cnet.com/
www.computershopper.co.uk/

-> The first step is to decide how much you have to spend...

-> You should get 512 ram and DDR is ok though 1gig is probably better.

-> 20 gig harddrive can be ok if you are not currently filling up your hard drive. You should check to see what type of harddrive it is. IDE or SCSI are your choices. IDE has an expanded varient that allows these types of drives to be manufactured to a larger size than previously allowed. I am not sure if both of these drives can get run together... Probably your 20 gig will get left if your old machine.

-> your monitor can get reused... probably.

Dell seems to have quite a few computers in the under $500. range:
http://shopper.cnet.com/Desktops/4007-3118_9-0.html?tag=sh.pfprice&minPrice=0&maxPrice=500

One critism I have about Dell, Gateway and HP are the custom parts. Pins or shaps of parts are custom made to only fit their parts. Upgrade ability may be impossible without buying one of their custom parts for much more.

The most important part is the vid card for EQ. Do not scimp on that part. Look at the video card and make sure that you either get a name brand card with the PC or budget to add one yourself.

If you decide to go with online parts, I would like to throw a plug in for www.newegg.com.

Prices are almost always competitive, can usually get free shipping and a top notch customer service team.

I have spent several thousand dollars with them over the last few years and I have zero complaints.

I gotta plug www.newegg.com too. I just built an entire system, and used them for all the parts. Warranties DO come from the manafacurer on all non-OEM parts btw, as long as you buy the retail version you're ok.

For a little over 1100 bucks, I got a system that included an AMD Athalon 64 2800 chip, a Soltek mobo with 800 FSB, a HiQ ATI Radeon 9800 pro VB (128MB), 1 gig of RAM, XP Home and EQ Platinum. (I won't bore ya with the rest). I can run full clip and full spells in PoK and Bazaar with 0 lag. Maybe a touch of flutter at 200+ peeps is all.

Gateway, Dell, and your local computer store is for suckers.

I agree with some of the posts above, that you should consider looking into a new system. Dell has some great systems for <$500. Also look at the Dell refurb area, where you can get some slightly better deals, especially if you do not want/need a new monitor.

Things to consider:
- While a faster CPU is great, it is better to trade off FSB speed for CPU speed. Your FSB speeds (for Intel) are 400/533/800. Most manufacturers don't even sell 400FSB anymore.. 533 is the minimum of even the basic home systems. You do not need a 3+GHz system. Anything between 2.2G and 3.0G is great. Again, a 2.8G/800FSB is better than a 3.0G/533FSB.
- RAM is important. EverQuest consumes about 425M of RAM minimum (with Luclin models enabled). The operating system consumes at least 100M of RAM. You *will* have other things running, so considering that you are alreay over the 512M barrier, you should consider an absolute minimum RAM of 512M (regardless of what CPU/video you decide on). The game 'requests' memory from Windows to operate, and this memory can either reside on a hardware chip (aka memory chip) or in the paging file on your hard drive. For example, if you are running a game that consumes 425M RAM, Windows uses 100M RAM, other misc stuff uses another 75M RAM (like antivirus, etc), then you are using 600M of RAM. If you only have 256M of hardware RAM, the rest is paged out to disk. This is why your hard drive goes crazy all the time and everything comes to a crawl, because in order for a game (or any program) to operate, the information must be 'paged in' from the disk into hard memory before it can be processed. So you are constantly copying information to and from your hard drive simply because you do not have enough hardware memory (RAM) to hold everything that is running. With all that said, if you plan on running EQ, upgrade to 768M (256Mx3) and you will see minimal, if any, paging. This will *greatly* decrease your zone-change times (e.g. from 2 mins to 15 secs). Not to mention you will increase the life of your hard drive because you are not using it nearly as much.
-Video card. One of the great things about upgrading your video card is that it can be moved from computer to computer. So you could upgrade your video card inside your old system, and, when money permits and you can afford a new computer, move the new card into the new computer. Typically run of the mill systems (like Dell, etc) will contain a decent but not so great video card, so it is quite common for people to NOT opt for the video upgrade from Dell, but rather stay with the el cheapo card and use their own video card when the system arrives at their home. When getting a video card, you want to get an AGP card. You will see things like AGP 1x/2x/4x/8x. You will be happy with 2x or 4x. If you can get 8x, great, but don't spend extra money on it. You motherboard will need to support the higher speed too in order to use the higher speeds, and chances are it doesn't anyhow. There are two main contenders in the video arena today, ATI (Radeon series) and nVidia. Both are great chipsets. Keep in mind that these companies primarily sell chips, not cards. Other companies actually make the cards. It is these companies that make up the differences between the cards. RAM size (this is video RAM not system RAM... ie: very fast memory that resides on the card itself) and support are the primary differences. Some card manufacterers will put crappy RAM on their cards, and may not operate under extreme conditions (ie: card/system lockups, visual artifacts/errors). Others may not have updated drivers come out very often. Tom's Hardware is a great site to check head to head comparisons of competitive cards. Expect to pay around $100 for a good card, $200 for a great card and $300 for an exceptional card.

So to summarize:
1) First and foremost, upgrade your RAM. Beat that 512M barrier at least, but if you can exceed 768M, do so. Make sure you find out exactly what your system can take. I think you have 3 memory slots, so you would need three 256M memory modules. If you have 256M now, chances are you have two 128M modules. Therefore you would need to ditch the 2-128s and buy 3-256s. Depending on your system, you may be able to use the 'cheap' new memory, which would probably cost you around $30 a stick ($90 total). If you need to use the 'old style' memory, that may be around $80 a stick. If this is the case, just buy one and go with the 512M total option. Keep in mind that your RAM will likely not be 'movable' to a new system, so this is a dead-end upgrade, but will give you the most bang for your buck.
2) Second, upgrade your video card. Don't get the bleeding edge cards. Try and stick with a new DirectX9 card (not just 'runs on DX9' but actually supports DX9 features). Get one with at least 128M video RAM on it. 256M is better. Check Tom's Hardware for comparision charts. This upgrade costs more money, but the upgrade is movable to a new system at a later time.
3) Lastly, system upgrade. Do not bother upgrading your CPU on your current system. There is a maximum speed you can upgrade to without upgrading your motherboard(mobo). Once you change your mobo, you will need new memory(RAM), new power supply and a new case (most likely), oh yeah and a new CPU. Consider looking at refurb models to save you a few dollars. You can pick up a nice refurb system from Dell for $400-$500. It usually includes free shipping, no monitor (nice if you already have a decent one), good drive (7200RPM/40G-80G), a CDRW and/or a DVD drive, decent memory (512M upgradable to 4G) and a fresh version of Windows XP. The newer systems also include on board audio (decent audio too if you are not an audiophile), ethernet (no more using up a PCI slot with a network card) and several USB ports (for mouse/keyboard/camera/etc). Another nice thing about the Dell systems is that they have an AGP slot, so you can move your cool new video card into that slot as soon as you get the new computer. Make sure to hang on to the one that came with the system, so when it comes time to sell the system, you can deliver it with the el-cheapo video card, and hang onto your own. Be wary! Some systems do NOT have an AGP slot and you will be forced to use the video chipset that comes with the system. Never, ever buy one of these systems/mobos.

And this is the short answer.

blah blah blah

dude if you're strapped for cash first thing i'd do is new video card or more ram
since we dont know the type of card you have it's hard to say which you need more but you can get a 64 meg nvidia card that runs eq pretty playably for somewhere around 45 bucks

also if you're really desperate you could try freedesktoppc.com it's basically a pyramid scheme but from what i hear they really are giving away free pc's if you jump thru all the hoops

I just upgraded. I know nothing about these things, so I had my bf write down what all I got. He wrote down the "things that matter".

ATI 9600xt
AMD FX 3000+ 400 FSB
Soltek KT880E-RL
1024MB dual Channel DDR 400 RAM
GAzelle case
He'd put his old 80 gig harddrive in, but took it out, so I still have my lil 40 one.

Seems to work pretty good :)