My parents currently have a computer with P3 866 Mhz. It used to belong to me before I acquired my laptop. When I acquired my laptop, I decided to give it to them. My parents told me it is getting slower and making a lot of noise nowadays (dust in the CPU fan I suppose) and I decided to instead of cleaning the dust fan, I will upgrade their CPU.

I am trying to decide between Intel and AMD. Which one would be better? My parents do not play games. They will mostly use it for emailing, MSN Messenger and taking pictures and viewing them on the computer.

This is what I heard: Intel is slightly faster, but AMD is much cheaper.

1 - AMD is not any less expensive than Intel. IMO they gave up competing on price a long time ago.

2 - Intel being faster is the inverse of AMD being less expensive. Price/performance depends on what you are comparing.

3 - My favorite processor for price/performance is the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400. It positively screams!

4 - This may not be helpful to you if you just want to upgrade the CPU. Your motherboard's CPU socket may not be suitable for any CPUs currently for sale. Intel and AMD change the pin arrangement on new models of CPUs on a regular basis. If you want a new CPU then you will probably need a new motherboard and new memory.

5 - If your parents are using Windows then try reinstalling Windows. That can be very helpful speeding up a Windows machine. In lieu of doing that you can get rid of the huge number of temporary files in the users' home directories. That can temporarily speed up a Windows computer. Getting a good registry cleaner may help. Forget about defragmenting the disk. It's a waste of time.

You are right "Intel is slightly faster, but AMD is much cheaper."
Well..you can go for the Intel Celeron which will be much cheaper than the other Intel pro's.

this is endless...I am ***VERY*** happy with my inexpensive quad core AMD 9450 rated to run at 1.8GHz, but thanks to overclocking which works very nice and stable on AMD processors, it is running at 2.2GHz with just a small increase in temperature (from 38C to 48C) using the original cooler system. AMD even offer a free windows program to help you to overclock their processors.

And it works just fine on Fedora 10 64bits. Virtualization is faster than in Intel chips thanks to AMD's advanced virtualization techonologis and the Nested Page which you found only on AMD (for now).

As Stress_junkie told you, may be you have to buy a new system which could be more expensive than you have planned.

'Upgrade their CPU' pretty much limits you to the processor brand that is already in there since the mobo wont take an AMD

Other than that you are pretty much screwed if they insist on MS as OS because to run vista or 7 you'll need to build a new box anyway to run it halfway decent.

For email and stuff I'd just tell them to get them a 200 $$ netbook and be done with it.

AMD - Intel? Get whatever is on sale.There is no difference for looking at pics and email.

I think the whole system is too obsolete to upgrade the CPU and/or other parts (except maybe the fan). Either clean it (hardware and software) or junk it and buy a real computer.

I don't think the problem is likely to be the CPU speed. More likely disk fragmentation, registry size, and lack of ram. If you're luck, you can get enough crap out of the registry and the disk (with add/remove software, a registry cleaner and some aggressive manual deletions to get the computer back to running decently). But if they're running newer applications or accessing larger data than before, you probably don't have enough ram.

More likely the case fan is dying. That is the one part I'd consider replacing in a system that old. You should also clean the CPU fan, so the CPU will run a little cooler. But those typically aren't noisy when dirty and they usually last longer than the case fan.

It also might be the power supply fan that is dying. Those are harder to replace than a case fan (though I have done it many times). Buying a whole power supply to replace a bad fan is easy and not too expensive, but is probably more than a system that old is worth.

For a new computer for ordinary home users, non gaming, I think an AMD dual core on a very low end motherboard with integrated graphics, is best. Intel costs more in that performance range. More than two cores doesn't make sense for ordinary home users. A separate graphics card doesn't make sense except for gaming.

For your CPU upgrade, forget it. Even if you find something that fits the CPU socket, it's a waste of money.

Actually I'd try to get the fastest CPU you can get for the mobo - those old boxes are in most cases more reliable (to a point) than newer ones.
Got a lot more trouble with 1 - 3 years old hardware than with older ones.They just don't build them like they used to

1) That assumes CPU speed == System speed. It doesn't. The system speed is probably more limited by ram size and disk size/fragmentation. Of course, just fixing those wouldn't give you a good speed. You need a fast CPU and enough ram and a fast, relatively unfragmented hard drive.

But just upgrading the CPU is less likely to improve speed than just adding ram.

2) Which part is noisy? That CPU fan would be my third guess (after case fan and power supply fan). Do you want to replace the CPU and its fan only to discover you still need to replace the power supply?

That sure doesn't fit my experience for systems built from bargain parts. I think there has been a slow steady improvement in quality.

Maybe it fits what I've seen with Dell systems at work (where IT insists on buying only Dell). None of them are as reliable as what I get assembling a system myself from bargain parts, but the Dell computers from the last couple years do seem to have a step down in quality even from the older Dells.

Maybe cases are going down in quality (bargain as well as Dell). If I can fit a new motherboard, new power supply, etc. in an old case, that tends to be better than a new case (not to mention saving a little money). But a case that had a P3 866 might not even fit a modern motherboard and power supply.

BTW, disk "fragmentation" is actually more related to how full the disk is than to whether you run the disk defragmentation software. I don't agree with stress_junkie that there is no need to defragment, but if your disk is over 80% full it will act fragmented even if you run defragment programs and if it is less than 60% full fragmentation won't be much of an issue even if you don't run them.

Got customers with lots of P3 boxes running happily while new systems tend to start getting troublesome after about 2 years.
If you look at mobo tests you'll find out that a lot get sold with at best halfcooked BIOS's and the the hardware is not different.
It's just that new technology comes up too fast to keep up with testing things before selling them but thats not only IT...