Would a discrete graphics card (AGP) make Windows XP snappier / less sluggish?

[mattnicholas.art]

Hi, I'm servicing my aunt's old Win XP machine and after making some nice upgrades to it (brand new Corsair 450 and Noctua fans) it's still dog slow even with maxing out the ram to 2GB. It's an Athlon XP 2000+ on a Jetway V6DP motherboard with 'Savage Pro 3D' graphics acceleration only, so my question is: would installing a GeForce 6200 AGP card help speed up the OS at all, or would there be little difference? Further to that, I was looking at a 512MB card but would a 256MB still give a good boost (if at all) to the system in general? She only uses it for the most basic of tasks and one Mahjong game in particular so I was only interested in speeding up the system itself, not anything for gameplay. Thanks.

 

[dontlistentome]

It depends on whether or not what she's doing uses hardware acceleration. For instance, that Mahjong game might use a 3d card's power if she had one, it might not. If it does, then yes upgrading the videocard would speed things up in that game. If not, the she'd notice no difference.

The first thing I'd do, if I was crazy enough to try to get an XP computer up and running, is make sure that nothing boots up with the OS except for the bare minimum required. You want that computer running as lean and mean as possible.

The other thing to know is that even the most 'basic of tasks' may have minimum requirements. If this computer is at or below those minimums then it's goint to be sluggish.

 

[mattnicholas.art]

It depends on whether or not what she's doing uses hardware acceleration. For instance, that Mahjong game might use a 3d card's power if she had one, it might not. If it does, then yes upgrading the videocard would speed things up in that game. If not, the she'd notice no difference.

The first thing I'd do, if I was crazy enough to try to get an XP computer up and running, is make sure that nothing boots up with the OS except for the bare minimum required. You want that computer running as lean and mean as possible.

The other thing to know is that even the most 'basic of tasks' may have minimum requirements. If this computer is at or below those minimums then it's goint to be sluggish.

Thanks for your help with this, I really appreciate your feedback. But after some more troubleshooting it seems that when the PSU died in my aunt's computer it must have also damaged the [mechanical] hard drive so I think we're going to call it quits with this one altogether - thankfully she has a spare Dell Optiplex 790 in her garage which we can use as a replacement (it's a 3GHz Core2 Duo but it's leagues faster than this poor, tired thing! And I think in fact may already have a GPU and SSD installed.)

In fact I would have used this spare machine before now but when I built it for her she refused to use it as it didn't have her favourite blessed Mahjong game on - and try as I might I couldn't get the game to install! :/Anyway...cheers, Matt