New build or scavenge old PC...

[woboy]

From a less experienced perspective:
Find a used GPU on forum classifieds
Increase RAM
Go to SSD
Possibly go to 771 Xeon mod (depends on motherboard, which may be a problem in itself).
Over clocked Q6600 are not poorly regarded, Xeon mod (if motherboard supported does somewhat better depending on chip.
But, experimentation can spend a lot of money to little purpose.

There are interesting posts concerning Athlon 860K performance. Look at A10-7850 CHIP?

 

[EarthDog]

@ TOCN - Why not? It's ram that can't be used over 4gb...not the cpu.

 

[Theocnoob]

@ TOCN - Why not? It's ram that can't be used over 4gb...not the cpu.

No 64 bit instructions. Everything in the OS gets done a tiny bit slower.

 

[EarthDog]

Noticeable? I wouldn't say so...

 

[rbico]

No 64 bit instructions. Everything in the OS gets done a tiny bit slower.

what do mean by this? That you wouldn't notice a difference betweenn32 and 64 (other than you'd run out of RAM faster)

 

[EarthDog]

You wont notice a difference on the processing side for what you do... Are there differences, sure. Are they negligible in most cases, yes. Its not something I would have mentioned, that is for sure.

Its worth it though to be able to use over 4GB of ram at minimum.

 

[rbico]

what do mean by this? That you wouldn't notice a difference betweenn32 and 64 (other than you'd run out of RAM faster)

Thanks for the clarification. I am hoping with the SDD that her reboots will be quick and she can just get in the habit of doing that 1-2 times a day to refresh the RAM.

But her main issue is not responding, so I am pretty confident that will go away. I rarely have those issues and our systems aren't that different.

 

[EarthDog]

SSD... and a system really doesn't need to be rebooted to clear the ram... She just needs to understand her PC use habits are not conducive to her system really...