Yes it does Phil, you need to upgrade, badly.

PS: you could upgrade for £75, ie: AMD Sempron 3,800 chip, 1 gig ram, and motherboard.
I built one for Shona (dogsey) last week and it's very good.

I feel really sad now

My poor old PC

Apple helped develop Firewire(IEEE 1394) Phil .There are many differant names for it too i.e sony's i-link, and pin configuration's as well, depending on whether it's IEEE 1394a(firewire 400) or IEEE 1394b (firewire 800) .And of course there are mini firewire ports/cables too. Its used on many many high end video cameras (my Canon xm2)and audio music production equipment as well as PC's and MAC's. Most pc's have at least one firewire port and if it does not, then you can buy a firewire pci card that usually come with 4 ports.

I think you should get a 1GB DDR ram module and a larger capacity internal HDD. Definitely get the memory first. 1GB DDR PC2700 is what you are looking for, you can install a maximum of 2gb in your system phil (looking at specs) I notice you have on board graphics too which will use some of your memory. You could buy a good graphics card with its own memory for around £40, would be much better than your on board graphics and wouldn't use your system memory either.

Thanks DJ

A lot to mull over there but I'm keen to try and get advice from those in the know.

Cheers

The mother board and chip package I quoted has on-board graphics Phil, and it's superb, 3d effects the lot, it's one of the best OBG I've seen, usually they're pretty basic but this one's really good for the money, It's a Foxconn K8M890M2MB.

Also, if you wish to upgrade again in the future to a dual-core chip it supports Athlon64FX, and Sempron64 chips.

Spec: PCI express ( for gaming graphics cards )
DDR2 800
IEEE 1394
Sata
4 USB ports, upgradeable to 8 if you wish.
2 Sata ports.

Not bad for the whole package (£75 including ram, and chip)

I would throw this in, if you go down the upgrade route have a check about as dell systems in the past have been notoriously hard to upgrade due to a few factors. I am not sure if thats true these days but have heard horror stories in the past.

So true Stormey, Dell are a nightmare to upgrade.

That would seem more like a downgrade IMO Nero, he has a 2.8GHZ p4, why swap the motherboard and CPU for an inferior processor which runs at 2.2GHZ? appart from a new board and processor which you suggest, he will still need new memory either way.

Why such a nightmare? its an intel motherboard. The memory and processor and graphics card can be upgraded and installed very easily (if you can find a p4 now)

From what I remember, Dell did have a habbit a few years back anyway and it did tend to be on the lower end models where they used custom sized dell parts so if you did want to upgrade you would have to get parts direct from them or one of their sellers, most times a lot more costly. Their was one model(cant remember) where due to the cased used you could not upgrade the graphics card despite the motherboard having space. Memory was one of the things what they had no probs with.

Like I said this was a few years back and may have since changed

Not very sporting of them blocking the AGP/PCI sockets. I dont think i've came across a case like that before whether from dell or anyone else, and I have upgraded pc's from dell amongst many others over the years. Sounds like the days when pc cases were all beige, weighed a ton and you cut your fingers trying to open up the case. and took forever getting it back on again.