Acer Aspire M3600 DDR2-SDRAM Tower Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core 2 GB 500 GB

Rose70

 Hello all, I have an old Acer Aspire M3600 DDR2 pc, still in good condition and would like to upgrade with an Wi-Fi card and more memory.  What cards, adaptors and memory would be suitable for this pc, any advice?

Thank you

StevenGen

Rose70 said:

 Hello all, I have an old Acer Aspire M3600 DDR2 pc, still in good condition and would like to upgrade with an Wi-Fi card and more memory.  What cards, adaptors and memory would be suitable for this pc, any advice?

Thank you

The Aspire M3600 is a very old desktop that came OEM with Windows XP and Vista of either 32bit or 64bit type operating systems and its specs are too low to handle Win-10 and/or the modern operating systems. At best it can handle Win-7 32bit.

It has the Socket T LGA 775 pin Intel Conroe FSB 800/1066 MHz type processor and the Intel 946GZ+ICH7DH chipset and can take a max of 2GB into its 2x slots of DDR2-667/533MHz 1.8V, 240-pin DIMM type RAM. 

With the WiFi you can buy a USB dongle but this dongle can only be made functional if you have the appropriate software that the dongle works under which won’t be for Win-XP or Vista so you will have to run Win-7. As a guide have a look at the Aspire D3600 Service Manual and see all its specs at the link provided.

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@Rose70

The 2GB maximum RAM is the biggest problem. Even if you have Wi-Fi working and can surf the internet, you cannot open many tabs and cannot run concurrent programs of reasonable size. Finding an USB Wi-Fi dongle is not a big problem. Just make sure it says it will be compatible with your current operating system on the package. I think some of your friends and relatives probably have some surplus old USB Wi-Fi dongles around and can give you one. An AC1200 dongle ( reasonable speed and price) will be available for less than USD $20.

Anyhow, the PC still in good condition doesn't mean it is fast enough and can run modern programs.

I retired an Intel C2D E6850 CPU PC last year (maximum RAM allowed was 2 GB). It was still in good, running condition but gave me plenty of restrictions during daily usages, slow in particular.

Do yourself a favor, acquiring a brand new, modern entry level PC with M.2 NVMe SSD as the storage drive (~ USD $450 to start with, even has Intel 10th generation CPU). You will appreciate the performance of the new machine and how much time you save each year instead of waiting for your PC to complete a task for you.