A friend of mine wants to know if his computer will run Photoshop CS3 Extended and Fireworks decently.

He has a compaq presario desktop with a 3100+ Sempron, 192mg ram, built in video card.

Obviously he needs more ram and a video card. How much RAM is needed - 1gig enough? I can give him a spare radeon 9600xt video card. However, is the 3100 sempron simply too crap to run Photoshop and Fireworks any good no matter how much ram he gets?

Should he just get an entirely new system?

Will run fine with RAM

Photoshop is a ram slut, get 2 gig.

Video cards aren't that important, the only real use for them is higher resolutions.
It is the CPU and RAM that determine how well image editors will run. Get a powerful CPU and plenty of ram (1gb is good for casual work), and save on video cards. Though who could turn down a freebie?

Maybe try Gimp first?

Ok cool,

What type of RAM should he get? Probably just go for 1gig. I'm not sure what sort of motherboard compaq uses but it doesnt show up when he turns the computer on. Is there anyway to find out what the m/board is without taking the pc apart?

When doing any graphic work the more ram the better. Prettu sure if you are running the latest version of photoshop you are going to want at least 2 gb of ram.

If he can't get that much try using something like photoshop 6 or 7.

i use gimp at work, and find it to be extremely unhelpful

really only use it coz i cant be assed lining up for our forms machine

gimp certainly doenst make anything easy for its users

I use CS2 on AXP 3200+ and 1gb of ram. Runs perfectly fine, well lags a bit on MASSIVE res's though.

you should be able to use a program like CPU-ID or Z-CPU to tell you what sort of ram it will have, if its an AM2 Sempron, it will be DDR2-533, otherwise, it should be DDR-333.

What type of RAM should he get?

Can't you only use compaq ram in compaq's? A dude I went to tafe with had one & was quite pissed coz he had to buy proprietary ram or something. Though I guess these days everyone's just using ddr/ddr2 compatible stuff but I wouldn't put it past them.

fukers.

will look into it.

Photoshop is a ram slut, get 2 gig.

I always found PS was a decent on ram, but after some uni assignments premiere is f***ing horrid