What is my computer

Hello all

Can I ask a simple queston for many and yet hard for a computer numpty like me........ ......I want to know what my computer "power" so to speak is ie I know its windows XP bit would like to know what hard drive I hvae ie...what power? what Ram I have etc...I used to know but now forgotten I am sure you can click something and it tells you?

The easiest way is to right click my computer on the desktop and choose properties.

Thats it I knew it was a click away...I am now figuring that what it says means its pretty basic....it a desktop and says Windows XP Professional. Pentium 4cpu 256mb ram....

My question can I boost my RAM by adding smething to make it quicker... like the external hard drives you see (Am not knowledgable but reading the argos catalogue page explaining computer jaron)

You can add more RAM and it will help up to a certain point, but the processor is what really defines the speed for the effort and expense of replacing a processor you may as well buy a new machine though.
when you open a file it is moved from the HDD to the RAM. the RAM has a limited capacity, 265MB in your case, and when too great a demand is placed on it it has to continuously swap data in and out of the HDD, which is what slows everything down. so if you have more RAM you can have more programs accessing bigger files without having to swap things in and out between the RAM and HDD all the time. If you want to upgrade your RAM you will have to check what kind of RAM your PC needs (Dell machines iirc only support dell RAM, couldn't say for other types) and that there is a free slot in your PC though.
External Harddrives are purely for data storage I believe, you may find moving all files over to a EHD makes the pc a bit quicker as it will sometimes substitute RAM for HDD space (this is called thrashing) but in the long run thrashing decreases system performance anyway!
This is just how I understand it from looking into it a couple of years ago... I may be totally wrong

Blinking heck....that is way beyond me I got the bit buy a new machine I may go down that route.....Thank you very very much for your assistance I will print off what you have said and keep reading it till it sinks in.

sorry, didn't mean to sound jargony. Think of your PC as a room with a table and a cabinet in it, the RAM is the table and the HDD is the cabinet with books inside. When you want to read a book from the cabinet, you put it on the table. You can only have a limited amount of books on the table though, so if you run out of space for books you have to swap some of them back into the cabinet. Alternatively, you can get a bigger table (upgrading your RAM)
I'm awful at explaining things, can you tell

You know thats the first time I have ever ever understood RAM now I get it thank you. I really do get it.

If it's any help we decided sometime ago, pc's are such a good price now that we'll likely replace instead of upgrading. As previously said a memory upgrade will only help to a certain point.

Yes may keep my old one for "spare"