What should i upgrade??

[johngiles]

What should I upgrade?
I have recently gotten my hands on a dell desktop. Its a few years old but in good working order. I am going to format the hard drive and install a Linux distro on it, most likely Kubuntu.

The computer is a Dell dimension 4400-
Pentium 4
512mb RAM
40gb Hard drive

It is working quite well but I would like to upgrade some hardware to put a bit more life into it. What should I upgrade? I'm thinking RAM. What other things can I do to revamp it?
I would like to use it for the following-

Photo and music storage
Photo editing
Basic music production
Watching DVDs
Office applications
Also any recommendations on which distro to use? I'm open and love trying out new ones so any that you might think would suit my needs (and computer) let me know :) Thanks

[ChuckFickens]

Well you have managed to mention about the two things that make a computer work hardest. Photo editing and music production.

Both of these will swallow up ram... so yep give it about another 1gig of ram!

Also a 40gb HDD is soon going to run out of space with music photos stored on it. I would consider an external hard drive and just use the internal 40gb as a system and software drive.

You've mentioned kubuntu, which is a perfectly good distro... though I assume you prefer the KDE desktop over Gnome, which is why you are looking a Kubuntu rather than ubuntu. The only thing I will mention is you may find slightly more support and aplications available for Ubuntu. Ubuntu should run fine on any p4, I'm on a mobile p4 1.7ghz with 1.5gb ram at the moment and it's running just fine.

And I've just realised I'm going to be late for work.... oppps damm answerbank :)

[VHG]

I would not bother upgrading.

Any money you spend on an upgrade will be wasted due to as slow CPU and other slow components like the BUS.

If you are going to spend money upgrading why not buy a new system unit (without opertaing system) from somewhere like Novatech.

Then install Linux.

[johngiles]

Hi. Thanks for your replies. Let me explain. This computer is just a spare one that i am using for messing about int. I don't need it to be a supercomputer by any means. I want to mess around with Linux on it mainly. I won't be doing any intensive work or storage on it. Any editing or storage will be minimal as i just want to figure out how everything works on various Linux distro's. I have a perfectly good computer for doing the hard work. I do prefer the KDE GUI but i am thinking would ubuntu be a better idea? I think its less taxing on the CPU? Am i right?

[fo3nix]

I'd strongly recommend putting 1GB in there, and changing the hard drive if you're going to store stuff on there.

Distro choice: The Ubuntu series is a good one to choose if you're new to Linux. I'd go with Ubuntu over Kubuntu though, for two reasons: 1) the support is a little better; 2) KDE 4 is newly released and not all that great yet (set to change with 4.2).

However, if you stick with 512MB, I'd definitely use Xubuntu. XFCE is much lighter on the resources, but still compatible with GNOME and KDE applications.

Music production: Linux isn't that great with this stuff right now.