Need some advice please

[mikemax23]

First let me begin by thanking you for having this site. I read through many of the previous posts before joining, and I know that any advice you can provide will be very useful and greatly appreciated.

The question I have is what is the best approach to upgrading my computer. I am really not knowledgeable enough to be confident in how or what to upgrade. Two years ago my sister gave me her computer because the hard drive had crashed. I replaced the hard drive and I haven't had any real problems with the computer other than I would like to have more memory and a faster system.

The computer is an emachine w-2047. It has an amd athelon xp 2000 processor and I replaced the hard drive with a maxto r6y080p0. The operating system is Windows XP Home Edition 2002.

I use the computer for basic home computing, and I am not into gaming. I would however like to increase the performance for downloading pictures from my digital camera and for movie and music downloads. I have found that I run out of memory very quickly, especially downloading and editing pictures from my digital camera.

The problem I have is I don't know exactly which hardware to improve--should I just increase the memory, should I add another hard drive, or should I replace the processor? I have done some research on the manufactorers website, and they do have a list of parts for upgrade, but I am not knowledgeable enough to know if it would be o.k. to use some other manufactorer for certain parts, particularly buying memory, because I have found better prices at other stores.

What advice do you have? I prefer not to buy another computer because the computer works fine for my needs now, I would just like to improve its performance.

Thanks

[glc]

About the only reasonable upgrade now would be to upgrade the ram. It has 2 ram slots, and each can handle 1gb for a total of 2gb. Standard ram was 256mb which is VERY light for XP. However, ram is not cheap. Here is guaranteed compatible ram:

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=W2047