Hey Craig - My brother gave me his old Gateway computer which is less of a dinosaur than my current DAW rig. It's a Gateway running XP SP2 with a 2 Ghz pentium processor and 512 megs of DDR RAM. I plan to add another 512 megs of RAM and have already cleaned off all of the old data and unneccessary programs. I also defragged the hard drive and will run a registry cleaner on it tonight. I need to find out if there are any other steps I should take before I install my EMU 0404 soundcard and start loading my DAW and other music software. Any tips here would be greatly appreciated. - Tracy

Well I am not Craig, nor do I play Craig on TV but this is how I would approach this:

1. before you do anything ensure you can upgrade the RAM. Many older machines you CANNOT. If so then replace the 512k with a gigabyte and if two slots then go to 2Gb. IF you cannot upgrade the Ram at least you saved yourself some time.

2. IF you have a legal license of Windows XP and the media I would strongly suggest reformatting the drive and installing a new copy of Win XP, then go connect to the 'net for the Win XP Service pack 3 bits.

Yeah I know it's best to do a clean install but this box doesn't appear to have the OS available for reinstallation as a partition on the hard drive and my brother didn't provide the OS disk whe he dropped the computer off. I was thinking about giving him a call to see if he has it.

A clean install is a good idea if you can swing it.

Also, I happened to post a DAW set up guide in the library here:
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3759&view=unread#unread

That should help tame the unneeded junk.

Excellent! Thanks!

I am looking forward to being able to run some plugins requiring SSE implementation. I'll finally be able use Bootsy's EQ, dynamics & reverb VSTs!

If you have troubles with the effects, then look at the CPU. The big thing for effects is going to be the CPU. Find out what the maximum CPU that board will take is and buy it. Because it's an older board, it won't cost much, but will make a big difference if there is much of a step up.

My current rig has a 1 Ghz AMD CPU that predates SSE implementation. This CPU is a 2 Ghz Pentium so it should significantly outperform my old system and also let me use plugins that require SSE.

We'll see how it does with the RAM upgrade and then take it from there.

My biggest concern is the hard drive because of it's age (5 plus years). Do you know if a Gateway machine will accept a third party aftermarket hard drive?

Seems to depend on the machine. Is it SATA or IDE?

If it's IDE, check the ribbon cable and see if it has spots blocked out.